A city wireless assessment team compares recovering a WPA2-PSK passphrase with aircrack-ng on CPU versus hashcat on a GPU lab box. At judgment level, what difference matters most?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of the wordlist as a giant phone book and the GPU as a warehouse of clerks flipping pages at once. Aircrack on a plain CPU still works, but hashcat on GPU usually burns through candidates much faster. Speed is the judgment call—not a different crypto magic.
Full Explanation
For WPA2-PSK offline recovery, both aircrack-ng and hashcat attempt passphrase candidates against captured handshake or related hash material. GPU-accelerated hashcat workloads commonly achieve much higher guess rates than CPU-bound aircrack runs. Tool choice is therefore often about throughput and workflow, not whether offline dictionary testing is possible. Assessors still need a complete, correctly targeted capture and a wordlist or ruleset that actually covers the passphrase.