I just discovered Pyrit which takes a step ahead in attacking WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK, the protocols that protect today’s public WIFI-airspace.

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 Many-Core- and other platforms through ATI-Stream, Nvidia CUDA, OpenCL and VIA Padlock, it is currently by far the most powerful attack against one of the world’s most used security-protocols.

I continue to be amazed by the widely varied uses that these hardware graphics accelerators can be put to!