WPA was designed with the small-office/home user in focus; while the protocol allows a sophisticated key-exchange to take place, most implementations like DSL/Cable/LAN-routers prefer the “Pre-Shared Key” mode. Exchange of the Pairwise Master Key (we will hear that term a lot) is simplified by using a common password that is known to all communicating parties
Pyrit takes a step ahead in attacking WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK, the protocol that today de-facto protects public WIFI-airspace. The project’s goal is to estimate the real-world security provided by these protocols. Pyrit does not provide binary files or wordlists and does not encourage anyone to participate or engage in any harmful activity. This is a research project, not a cracking tool. Pyrit combines the power and convenience of Python with the high performance of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
Pyrit’s implementation allows to create massive databases, pre-computing part of the WPA/WPA2-PSK authentication phase in a space-time-tradeoff. The performance gain for real-world-attacks is in the range of three orders of magnitude which urges for re-consideration of the protocol’s security. Exploiting the computational power of GPUs, this is currently by far the most powerful attack against one of the world’s most used security-protocols.
Pyrit is free software - free as in freedom. Everyone can inspect, copy or modify it and share derived work under the GNU General Public License v3.
What's new
See http://pyrit.wordpress.com
How to use
Pyrit compiles and runs fine on Linux and MacOS X. None of the BSD systems were tested but all posix systems should be fine anyway. I don't care about Windows; drop me a line (read: patch) if you make Pyrit work without copying half of GNU in binary form...
For further info see http://code.google.com/p/pyrit/wiki/FirstSteps
