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I'm trying to do a brute force with Hashcat on windows with a GPU cracking a wpa2.hccapx handshake. Based on my research I know the password is 10 characters, a mix of random lowercase + numbers only

Hashcat says it will take 10 years using ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a AND it will take almost 115 days to crack it when I use ?h?h?h?h?h?h?h?h?h?h.

Is there any way to minimize this?

I was reading in several places that if I use certain commands it will help to speed the process but I don't feel like I'm doing it correctly.

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  • What kind of hardware do you have?
    – mhr
    Commented Aug 11, 2021 at 6:52
  • AMD Ramdeon RTX 580 8gb, I even tried the Super Powerful Cloud Hashing Server with 8 GPU's and still gives me 12 yrs to decrypted the wpa2.hccax file, I want to think that something is wrong on my command line. I used, hashcat.exe -a 3 -m 2500 -d 1 wpa2.hccapx -increment (password 10 characters long) -1 ?l?d (?L(lowercase)?D) ?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1
    – sghost
    Commented Sep 7, 2021 at 20:36

1 Answer 1

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It will take about 600 years to brute force through all of your combinations (<Number of characters>^<Password length>/<Hashes per second>/60/60/24/365). I will still give you the instructions since knowing them might be useful for other cases.

The first step is to define your specific charset. Hashcat provides the following built-in charsets:

  ? | Charset
 ===+=========
  l | abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz [a-z]
  u | ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ [A-Z]
  d | 0123456789                 [0-9]
  h | 0123456789abcdef           [0-9a-f]
  H | 0123456789ABCDEF           [0-9A-F]
  s |  !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
  a | ?l?u?d?s
  b | 0x00 - 0xff

Since your password is 10 chars and of mixed random lowercase + numbers only, you need to define a custom charset with the flag -1 ?d?l. By doing so, you define the charset ?1 that contains all lowercase letters (?l) and all numbers (?d). Then you need to use ?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1 as the mask, since your password is exactly 10 characters long.

Now to the ways of improving your cracking speed.

  1. Hashcat -m2500 is deprecated. Convert your cap file to the pmkid hash format for best performance. This can easily be done using hcxpcapngtool -o <output file> <.cap file>.

  2. Use all of your available processors. hashcat -I shows all of your available GPUs and CPUs. Use the flags -D or -d to make use all of your devices. (Keep in mind that CPU cracking is under normal circumstances much slower than GPU cracking)

  3. Use the -w flag

- [ Workload Profiles ] -

  # | Performance | Runtime | Power Consumption | Desktop Impact
 ===+=============+=========+===================+=================
  1 | Low         |   2 ms  | Low               | Minimal
  2 | Default     |  12 ms  | Economic          | Noticeable
  3 | High        |  96 ms  | High              | Unresponsive
  4 | Nightmare   | 480 ms  | Insane            | Headless

With -w you can specify how much of the available computing resources will be utilized by hashcat. Use -w 4 for best performance.

  1. Use --markov-disable to disable markov chains (password guesses based on statistical patterns). Markov chains can drastically decrease cracking time when attempting to crack a password that isn't randomly generated. Since your searched password is completely random, we can disable it to save a little computing power.
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