Time for action – decrypting WEP and WPA packets

1. We will decrypt packets from the same WEP capture file, we created earlier WEPCrackingDemo-01.cap. For this, we will use another tool in the Aircrack-ng suite called Airdecap-ng. We run the following command as shown in the following screenshot: airdecap-ng -w abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdef12 WEPCrackingDemo-01.cap, using the WEP key we cracked previously:

   

2. The decypted files are stored in a file named WEPCrackingDemo-01-dec.cap. We use the tshark utility to view the first ten packets in the file. Please note that, you may see something different based on what you captured:

   

3. WPA/WPA2 PSK would work in exactly the same way as with WEP using the airdecap-ng utility as shown in the following figure, with the airdecap-ng –p abdefgh WPACrackingDemo-01.cap –e "Wireless Lab" command:

   

What just happened?

We just saw, how we can decrypt WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK encrypted packets using Airdecap-ng. It is interesting to note, that we can do the same using Wireshark...