Technologies9: How to crack WiFi Password using 5 simple steps

5 Simple steps to Crack WiFi Password:

Wi-Fi Network's WPA Password with Reaver

Step 1: Boot into BackTrack

To boot into BackTrack, just put the DVD in your drive and boot your machine from the disc. During the boot process, BackTrack will prompt you to to choose the boot mode. Select "BackTrack Text - Default Boot Text Mode" and press Enter.

Eventually BackTrack will boot to a command line prompt. When you've reached the prompt, type startx and press Enter. BackTrack will boot into its graphical interface.

How to crack WiFi Password using 5 simple steps

Step 2: Install Reaver

Update: This step is no longer necessary, as Reaver comes pre-installed on Backtrack 5 R3. Skip down to Step 3.

Reaver has been added to the bleeding edge version of BackTrack, but it's not yet incorporated with the live DVD, so as of this writing, you need to install Reaver before proceeding. To install Reaver, you'll first need to connect to a Wi-Fi network that you have the password to.

1. Click Applications > Internet > Wicd Network Manager
2. Select your network and click Connect, enter your password if necessary, click OK, and then click Connect a second time.

Now that you're online, let's install Reaver. Click the Terminal button in the menu bar (or click Applications > Accessories > Terminal). At the prompt, type:

apt-get update

And then, after the update completes:

apt-get install reaver

If all went well, Reaver should now be installed. It may seem a little lame that you need to connect to a network to do this, but it will remain installed until you reboot your computer. At this point, go ahead and disconnect from the network by opening Wicd Network Manager again and clicking Disconnect. 

How to crack WiFi Password using 5 simple steps

Step 3: Gather Your Device Information, Prep Your Crackin'

In order to use Reaver, you need to get your wireless card's interface name, the BSSID of the router you're attempting to crack (the BSSID is a unique series of letters and numbers that identifies a router), and you need to make sure your wireless card is in monitor mode. So let's do all that.

Find your wireless card: Inside Terminal, type:

iwconfig

Press Enter. You should see a wireless device in the subsequent list. Most likely, it'll be named wlan0, but if you have more than one wireless card, or a more unusual networking setup, it may be named something different.

Put your wireless card into monitor mode: Assuming your wireless card's interface name is wlan0, execute the following command to put your wireless card into monitor mode:

airmon-ng start wlan0

This command will output the name of monitor mode interface, which you'll also want to make note of. Most likely, it'll be mon0, like in the screenshot below. Make note of that.

Find the BSSID of the router you want to crack: Lastly, you need to get the unique identifier of the router you're attempting to crack so that you can point Reaver in the right direction. To do this, execute the following command:

airodump-ng wlan0

(Note: If airodump-ng wlan0 doesn't work for you, you may want to try the monitor interface instead—e.g., airodump-ng mon0.)

You'll see a list of the wireless networks in range—it'll look something like the screenshot below:

When you see the network you want, press Ctrl+C to stop the list from refreshing, then copy that network's BSSID (it's the series of letters, numbers, and colons on the far left). The network should have WPA or WPA2 listed under the ENC column.

Now, with the BSSID and monitor interface name in hand, you've got everything you need to start up Reaver.

How to crack WiFi Password using 5 simple steps

Step 4: Crack a Network's WPA Password with Reaver

Now execute the following command in the Terminal, replacing bssid and moninterface with the BSSID and monitor interface and you copied down above:

reaver -i moninterface -b bssid -vv

For example, if your monitor interface was mon0 like mine, and your BSSID was 8D:AE:9D:65:1F:B2 (a BSSID I just made up), your command would look like:

reaver -i mon0 -b 8D:AE:9D:65:1F:B2 -vv

Press Enter, sit back, and let Reaver work its disturbing magic. Reaver will now try a series of PINs on the router in a brute force attack, one after another. This will take a while. In my successful test, Reaver took 2 hours and 30 minutes to crack the network and deliver me with the correct password. As mentioned above, the Reaver documentation says it can take between 4 and 10 hours, so it could take more or less time than I experienced, depending. When Reaver's cracking has completed, it'll look like this:

A few important factors to consider: Reaver worked exactly as advertised in my test, but it won't necessarily work on all routers (see more below). Also, the router you're cracking needs to have a relatively strong signal, so if you're hardly in range of a router, you'll likely experience problems, and Reaver may not work. Throughout the process, Reaver would sometimes experience a timeout, sometimes get locked in a loop trying the same PIN repeatedly, and so on. I just let it keep on running, and kept it close to the router, and eventually it worked its way through.

Also of note, you can also pause your progress at any time by pressing Ctrl+C while Reaver is running. This will quit the process, but Reaver will save any progress so that next time you run the command, you can pick up where you left off-as long as you don't shut down your computer (which, if you're running off a live DVD, will reset everything).

How Reaver Works

Now that you've seen how to use Reaver, let's take a quick overview of how Reaver works. The tool takes advantage of a vulnerability in something called Wi-Fi Protected Setup, or WPS. It's a feature that exists on many routers, intended to provide an easy setup process, and it's tied to a PIN that's hard-coded into the device. Reaver exploits a flaw in these PINs; the result is that, with enough time, it can reveal your WPA or WPA2 password.

How to Protect Yourself Against Reaver Attacks

Since the vulnerability lies in the implementation of WPS, your network should be safe if you can simply turn off WPS (or, even better, if your router doesn't support it in the first place). Unfortunately, as Gallagher points out as Ars, even with WPS manually turned off through his router's settings, Reaver was still able to crack his password.

How to crack WiFi Password using 5 simple steps