Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of command-line tools for assessing the security of 802.11 (WiFi) networks. It groups its functionality into four areas: monitoring (packet capture and export for third-party analysis), attacking (replay attacks, deauthentication, fake access points, and packet injection), testing (verifying WiFi card and driver capture/injection capability), and cracking (recovering WEP keys and WPA/WPA2-PSK passphrases). Because it is entirely CLI-driven, it lends itself to scripting and automation, and it runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and eComStation 2.

Origins: Aircrack

The suite traces back to Aircrack, created by French security researcher Christophe Devine, which focused on recovering WEP keys using statistical and cryptographic attacks (including techniques developed by the researcher known as KoreK). Early Aircrack releases reportedly appeared around 2004, adding capabilities such as the ARP-replay and ChopChop attacks as WEP-cracking research progressed.

The Aircrack-ng fork

In February 2006, Thomas d'Otreppe de Bouvette forked the original Aircrack codebase and released it as "Aircrack Next Generation" (Aircrack-ng). This fork became the actively maintained lineage, eventually eclipsing the original project, and Aircrack-ng has since been developed by d'Otreppe together with a community of contributors under the Aircrack-ng team/organization.

Tooling and licensing

The suite comprises roughly fifteen tools, including airmon-ng and airodump-ng (monitor-mode setup and packet capture), aireplay-ng (traffic replay/injection), packetforge-ng, airbase-ng (fake AP), airdecap-ng/airdecloak-ng, airolib-ng, and the core aircrack-ng cracking utility, among others. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPL-2.0), with an accompanying OpenSSL license component, and its source is hosted on GitHub under the aircrack-ng organization. It is preinstalled in security-focused Linux distributions such as Kali Linux and Parrot Security OS.

Development and releases

Development has continued for two decades, with the project's GitHub repository recording thousands of commits over its history. Notable stable releases include version 1.2 (2016), 1.3 (2016), 1.4 (2017), the 1.5.x series (2018), 1.6 (January 2020), and 1.7 (May 10, 2022) — the last of these following more than two years of work and reportedly including over 400 commits of fixes and new features. In December 2022 the project migrated its community support from a traditional web forum to GitHub Discussions, archiving the old forum as a static reference. The project also offers a paid "WiFi Exploitation 101" training course through its website.

Note: some early Aircrack version numbers and dates (e.g., exact 2004 release dates) are reported by secondary sources and should be treated as less firmly verified than the GitHub-recorded Aircrack-ng release history.

Timeline

• 2004Christophe Devine develops the original Aircrack tool for recovering 802.11 WEP keys (early version numbers/dates from this period are less firmly documented).
• 2006-02Thomas d'Otreppe de Bouvette forks Aircrack, releasing it as Aircrack Next Generation (Aircrack-ng).
• 2016-04-15Aircrack-ng 1.2 stable release.
• 2016-07-11Aircrack-ng 1.3 released.
• 2017-09-29Aircrack-ng 1.4 released.
• 2018-12-09Aircrack-ng 1.5.2 released (1.5 and 1.5.1 flagged by the project as skip-worthy, superseded by 1.5.2).
• 2020-01-25Aircrack-ng 1.6 released.
• 2022-05-10Aircrack-ng 1.7 released after more than two years of development, with 400+ commits of changes.
• 2022-12-06Project moves community support from its legacy forum to GitHub Discussions.