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Recovering WPA hashes using fingerprint recovery
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Articles and video

You may find it helpful to read our articles on Windows security and password recovery examples. Video section contains a number of movies about our programs in action

Wireless Password Recovery - fingerprint recovery


Fingerprint recovery is a brand-new tool for recovering complex passwords, which could not be decrypted by other recovery methods. The idea of the attack is that here, to recover a password, the program takes neither individual words, like in the dictionary recovery, nor even word combinations, like in the combined attack, but so-called 'fingerprints'. Every source word from the dictionary is used for generating a lot of fingerprints.

Before running the recovery, you should specify a source wordlist to be used for creating the fingerprint bank. The software comes with a built-in dictionary, optimized for this attack, but you can use yours or download one off the Internet. There are no certain requirements to the dictionary, except one: it must not be too large; otherwise, the recovery will take ages.

Setting up fingerprint recovery

Here is the way to generate fingerprints: first, break each word from the source wordlist into one-character passwords, then - into 2-character, etc. For instance, let's break the source word crazy into one-character fingerprints. We get:
c
r
a
z
y

Now, two-character:
cr
ra
az
zy

Next, three-character:
cra
raz
azy

And, finally, four-character:
craz
razy


We have got 5+4+3+2 = 14 fingerprints, not counting the source word.
The same is for all other words of the source wordlist. After this, all the fingerprints are dumped into a single duplicate-less database. So we have got a database of fingerprints that would be used for checking passwords by gluing all the fingerprints with each other and finding the match.

The real fingerprint generation algorithm is much more sophisticated. Moreover, there is an option in the attack settings, Maximize efficiency when generating fingerprints, which uses a more sophisticated algorithm, which maximizes the efficiency (at the expense of speed) by generating additional fingerprints.

Let's take a look at the remaining options.

  • Use PPP engine to generate additional passwords - use passwords found in other attacks when generating fingerprints.
  • Use keyboard and frequently used sequences - add keyboard combinations and common sequences to the fingerprint database.
  • Use dates - add dates to fingerprints.
  • Use numbers and common sequences - use digits, frequently used and simple combinations of letters.


The second tab with the settings allows creating a custom wordlist using the current options of the fingerprint attack. Be careful; that dictionary may take up a lot of space on your computer's hard disk.

Creating fingerprint recovery wordlist


On the third tab, you can download dictionaries for fingerprint recovery from our Web site.

Passcape Online wordlsists