Pyrit allows to create massive databases, pre-computing part of the IEEE 802.11 WPA/WPA2-PSK authentication phase in a space-time-tradeoff. Exploiting the computational power of Many-Core- and other platforms through ATI-Stream, Nvidia CUDA and OpenCL, it is currently by far the most powerful attack against one of the world's most used security-protocols.

WPA/WPA2-PSK is a subset of IEEE 802.11 WPA/WPA2 that skips the complex task of key distribution and client authentication by assigning every participating party the same pre shared key. This master key is derived from a password which the administrating user has to pre-configure e.g. on his laptop and the Access Point. When the laptop creates a connection to the Access Point, a new session key is derived from the master key to encrypt and authenticate following traffic. The "shortcut" of using a single master key instead of per-user keys eases deployment of WPA/WPA2-protected networks for home- and small-office-use at the cost of making the protocol vulnerable to brute-force-attacks against it's key negotiation phase; it allows to ultimately reveal the password that protects the network. This vulnerability has to be considered exceptionally disastrous as the protocol allows much of the key derivation to be pre-computed, making simple brute-force-attacks even more alluring to the attacker. For more background see this article on the project's blog.

The author does not encourage or support using Pyrit for the infringement of peoples' communication-privacy. The exploration and realization of the technology discussed here motivate as a purpose of their own; this is documented by the open development, strictly sourcecode-based distribution and 'copyleft'-licensing.

Pyrit is free software - free as in freedom. Everyone can inspect, copy or modify it and share derived work under the GNU General Public License v3+. It compiles and executes on a wide variety of platforms including FreeBSD, MacOS X and Linux as operation-system and x86-, alpha-, arm-, hppa-, mips-, powerpc-, s390 and sparc-processors.

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http://code.google.com/p/pyrit/

Installation

How to get Pyrit working on your system.
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Updated Apr 5, 2011 by lukas.l...@googlemail.com

Introduction

This document will guide you through the installation of Pyrit and it's modules.

Pyrit compiles and runs on Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS. Windows is not (and probably never will be) supported; there are however some reports of successful installations on Windows with the help of MinGW.

Pyrit consists of basically two parts:

The main module features the commandline-client, the scheduling- and database-code and a basic extension-module that uses the CPU for computation. The main module is required for everyone...
There are currently two extension modules that add support for more advanced hardware. The extension modules for Nvidia-CUDA and OpenCL may be installed optionally and are used if available and supported by local hardware.

You can choose between OpenCL and CUDA if you have a compatible Nvidia-GPU; you may want to take a look at this page to find out if your hardware supports Nvidia-CUDA. People with GPUs from ATI are supported through AMD's OpenCL-implementation and may find this page of interest; other possible OpenCL-platforms like IBM's Cell B.E. (that powers the Playstation 3) should work but are untested at the moment.

Compiling from sources

Compiling from source-code is the preferred way of getting Pyrit onto your system. Linux users running a binary distribution may need to install the development packages for Python (e.g. python-devel), OpenSSL (e.g. openssl-devel or libssl-dev) and Zlib (e.g. zlib-devel). You also need a C-compiler like gcc. Users of MacOS probably only need to have XCode installed.

From time to time Pyrit get's packed into (hopefully) stable packages. In general you should download, compile and install these source-code packages from the Download area. The more adventurous among you may instead want to try the latest source-code in Pyrit's repository. The code in svn-trunk may include more features and provide better performance but also may cause random problems or even not compile at all. Use the fixed packages when in doubt.