1. Aircrack
Aircrack is the most popular and widely-known wireless password cracking tool. It is used as 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking tool around the globe. It first captures packets of the network and then try to recover password of the network by analyzing packets. It also implements standard FMS attacks with some optimizations to recover or crack password of the network. optimizations include KoreK attacks and PTW attack to make the attack much faster than other WEP password cracking tools. This tool is powerful and used most widely across the world. This is the reason I am adding it at the top of the list.
It offers console interface. If you find this tool hard to use, you can try the available online tutorials. Company behind this tool also offers online tutorial to let you learn by yourself.
2. AirSnort
AirSnort is another popular wireless LAN password cracking tool. It can crack WEP keys of Wi-Fi802.11b network. This tool basically operates by passively monitoring transmissions and then computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. This tool is freely available for Linux and Windows platform. It is also simple to use. The tool has not been updated for around three years, but it seems that company behind this tool is now interested in further development. This tool is also directly involved in WEP cracking and hence used widely.
3. Kismet
Kismet is another Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n layer 2 wireless network sniffer and intrusion detection system. This tool is basically used in Wi-Fi troubleshooting. It works fine with any Wi-Fi card supporting rfmon mode. It is available for Windows, Linux, OS X and BSD platforms. This tool passively collects packets to identify standard network and also detects the hidden networks. Built on a client server modular architecture, this tool can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, and 802.11n traffic. It is an open source tool and supports recent faster wireless standards.
4. Cain & Able
Cain & Able is another popular tool used for cracking wireless network passwords. This tool was developed to intercept the network traffic and then use the brute forcing to discover the passwords. This is why this tool helps a lot while finding the password of wireless network by analyzing the routing protocols. This tool can also be used to crack other kind of passwords. It is one of the most popular password cracking tools.
This tool is not just for WEP cracking but various other features are also there. It is basically used for Windows password cracking. This is the reason this tool is so popular among users.
5. WireShark
WireShark is a very popular tool in networking. It is the network protocol analyzer tool which lets you check different things in your office or home network. You can live capture packets and analyze packets to find various things related to network by checking the data at the micro-level. This tool is available for Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and other platforms.
If you are thinking to try this tool, I recommend you to first read about networking and protocols. WireShark requires good knowledge of network protocols to analyze the data obtained with the tool. If you do not have good knowledge of that, you may not find this tool interesting. So, try only if you are sure about your protocol knowledge.
Wireshark does is one of the most popular tool in networking and this is why it was included in this list in higher position.
6. Fern WiFi Wireless Cracker
Fern WiFi Wireless Cracker is another nice tool which helps with network security. It lets you see real-time network traffic and identify hosts. Basically this tool was developed to find flaws in computer networks and fixes the detected flaws. It is available for Apple, Windows and Linux platforms.
It is able to crack and recover WEP/WPA/WPS keys easily. It can also run other network based attacks on wireless or Ethernet based networks. For cracking WPA/WPA2, it uses WPS based on dictionary based attacks. For WEP cracking, it uses Fragmentation, Chop-Chop, Caffe-Latte, Hirte, ARP Request Replay or WPS attack.
This tool is in active development. SO, you can expect timely update with new features. Pro version of the tool is also available which offers much features.
7. CoWPAtty
CoWPAtty is another nice wireless password cracking tool. It is an automated dictionary attack tool for WPA-PSK to crack the passwords. It runs on Linux OS and offers a less interesting command line interface to work with. It runs on a word-list containing thousands of password to use in the attack. If the password is in the password’s word-list, this tool will surely crack the password. But this tool is slow and speed depends on the word list and password’s strength. Another reason for slow process is that the hash uses SHA1 with a seed of SSID. It means the same password will have a different SSIM. So, you cannot simply use the rainbow table against all access points. So, the tool uses the password dictionary and generates the hash for each word contained in the dictionary by using the SSID. This tool is simple to use with available commands.
With the newer version of the tool CoWPAtty tried to improve the speed by using a pre-computed hash file to avoid the computation at the time of cracking. This pre-computed file contains around 172000 dictionary file for around 1000 most popular SSIDs. But for successful attack, your SSID must be in that list. If your SSID is not in those 1000, you are unlucky. Still, you can try this tool to see how it works.
8. Airjack
Airjack is a Wi-Fi 802.11 packet injection tool. It is used to perform DOS attack and MIM attack. This wireless cracking tool is very useful in injecting forged packets and making a network down by denial of service attack. This tool can also be used for a man in the middle attack in the network. This tool is popular and powerful both.
9. WepAttack
WepAttack is another working open source Linux tool for breaking 802.11 WEP keys. Like few other tools in the list, this tool also performs an active dictionary attack. It tests millions of words from its dictionary to find the working key for the network. Only a working WLAN card is required to work with WepAttack to perform the attack. Limited usability but works awesome on supported WLAN cards.
10. NetStumbler
NetStumbler is another wireless password cracking tool available only for Windows platform. It helps in finding open wireless access points. This tool is freely available. Basically NetStumbler is used for wardriving, verifying network configurations, finding locations with a poor network, detecting unauthorized access points, and more.
This tool is not very effective now. Main reason is that last stable release of the tool was back in April 2004 around 11 years ago. So, it does not work with 64-bit Windows OS. It can also be easily detected with most of the wireless intrusion detection systems available. So, you can use this tool for learning purpose on home network to see how it works.
A trimmed down version dubbed as ‘MiniStumbler’ of the tool is also available. This tool is too old but it still works fine on supported systems. So, I included it in this list.
