Aircrack-ng: Pause and Resume Password Cracking

In some cases, it’s not possible to сrack WPA/WPA2-PSK key with aircrack-ng in one step, especially while using a large dictionary.

Unfortunately, aircrack-ng can’t pause and then resume cracking itself, but it is possible to save and then continue session with John The Ripper.

In this small note you’ll find how to save the current state of aircrack-ng and then continue the cracking from where it was stopped.

Cool Tip: Crack Wi-Fi access points with WPA/WPA2-PSK easily! Reliable and verified way! Read more →

Install John The Ripper

Run the following command to install John The Ripper, if you haven’t done it yet:

$ sudo apt-get install john

Cool Tip: Most likely you do not need to install “John the Ripper” system-wide, as you can use it without installation! Read more →

Pause/Resume Aircrack-ng

If you crack WPA/WPA2-PSK key with John The Ripper, you can press any key to check the current status.

When you press Q or Ctrl + C, John The Ripper aborts/pause cracking and saves the information about the progress of the current session to a file ~/.john/john.rec (by default).

To continue an interrupted session, run the John with --restore=[session name] option.

Let’s use John The Ripper to create a session foo, pipe its output to aircrack-ng, try to PAUSE and then RESUME the cracking.

Aircrack-ng: START

Start cracking WPA/WPA2-PSK key, using John The Ripper and aircrack-ng:

$ john --session=foo --stdout --wordlist=wordlist.dic | aircrack-ng -w - -b 00:11:22:33:44:55 WPAcrack.cap

Option	Description
`--session`	The name of the session
`--wordlist`	The name of the dictionary file
`-b`	The MAC address of the access point
`WPAcrack.cap`	The name of the file that contains the authentication handshake