Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of tools to assess WiFi network security.

It focuses on different areas of WiFi security:

• Monitoring: Packet capture and export of data to text files for further processing by third party tools.
• Attacking: Replay attacks, deauthentication, fake access points and others via packet injection.
• Testing: Checking WiFi cards and driver capabilities (capture and injection).
• Cracking: WEP and WPA PSK (WPA 1 and 2).

All tools are command line which allows for heavy scripting. A lot of GUIs have taken advantage of this feature. It works primarily Linux but also Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, as well as Solaris and even eComStation 2.

Building

Requirements

• Autoconf
• Automake
• Libtool
• shtool
• OpenSSL development package or libgcrypt development package.
• Airmon-ng (Linux) requires ethtool.
• On windows, cygwin has to be used and it also requires w32api package.
• On Windows, if using clang, libiconv and libiconv-devel
• Linux: LibNetlink 1 or 3. It can be disabled by passing –disable-libnl to configure.
• pkg-config (pkgconf on FreeBSD)
• FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and OS X with macports: gmake
• Linux/Cygwin: make and Standard C++ Library development package (Debian: libstdc++-dev)

Optional stuff

• If you want SSID filtering with regular expression in airodump-ng (-essid-regex) pcre development package is required.
• If you want to use airolib-ng and ‘-r’ option in aircrack-ng, SQLite development package >= 3.3.17 (3.6.X version or better is recommended)
• If you want to use Airpcap, the ‘developer’ directory from the CD/ISO/SDK is required.
• In order to build besside-ng, besside-ng-crawler, easside-ng, tkiptun-ng and wesside-ng, libpcap development package is required (on Cygwin, use the Aircap SDK instead; see above)
• For best performance on FreeBSD (50-70% more), install gcc5 (or better) via: pkg install gcc7
• rfkill

Resolving the basic requirements

Below are instructions for installing the basic requirements to build aircrack-ng for a number of operating systems.

Linux

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libpcre3-dev ethtool shtool rfkill zlib1g-dev libpcap-dev

Fedora/CentOS/RHEL

sudo yum install libtool pkgconfig sqlite-devel autoconf automake openssl-devel libpcap-devel pcre-devel rfkill libnl3-devel gcc gcc-c++ ethtool

FreeBSD

pkg install pkgconf shtool libtool gcc7 automake autoconf pcre sqlite3 openssl gmake

OSX

XCode, Xcode command line tools and HomeBrew are required.

brew install autoconf automake libtool openssl shtool pkg-config

Windows

Cygwin

Cygwin requires the full path to the setup.exe utility, in order to automate the installation of the necessary packages. In addition, it requires the location of your installation, a path to the cached packages download location, and a mirror URL.

An example of automatically installing all the dependencies is as follows:

c:\cygwin\setup-x86.exe -qnNdO -R C:/cygwin -s http://cygwin.mirror.constant.com -l C:/cygwin/var/cache/setup -P autoconf -P automake -P bison -P gcc-core -P gcc-g++ -P mingw-runtime -P mingw-binutils -P mingw-gcc-core -P mingw-gcc-g++ -P mingw-pthreads -P mingw-w32api -P libtool -P make -P python -P gettext-devel -P gettext -P intltool -P libiconv -P pkg-config -P git -P wget -P curl -P libpcre-devel -P openssl-devel -P libsqlite3-devel

MSYS2

pacman -Sy autoconf automake-wrapper libtool msys2-w32api-headers msys2-w32api-runtime gcc pkg-config git python openssl-devel openssl libopenssl msys2-runtime-devel gcc binutils make pcre-devel libsqlite-devel

Compiling

To build aircrack-ng, the Autotools build system is utilized. Autotools replaces the older method of compilation.

NOTE: If utilizing a developer version, eg: one checked out from source control, you will need to run a pre-configure script. The script to use is one of the following: autoreconf -i or env NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh.

First, ./configure the project for building with the appropriate options specified for your environment:

./configure <options>

TIP: If the above fails, please see above about developer source control versions.

Next, compile the project (respecting if make or gmake is needed):

• Compilation:

  make

• Compilation on *BSD or Solaris:

  gmake

Finally, the additional targets listed below may be of use in your environment:

• Execute all unit testing:

  make check

• Installing:

  make install

• Uninstall:

  make uninstall

./configure flags

When configuring, the following flags can be used and combined to adjust the suite to your choosing:

• with-airpcap=DIR: needed for supporting airpcap devices on windows (cygwin or msys2 only) Replace DIR above with the absolute location to the root of the extracted source code from the Airpcap CD or downloaded SDK available online. Required on Windows to build besside-ng, besside-ng-crawler, easside-ng, tkiptun-ng and wesside-ng when building experimental tools. The developer pack (Compatible with version 4.1.1 and 4.1.3) can be downloaded at https://support.riverbed.com/content/support/software/steelcentral-npm/airpcap.html
• with-experimental: needed to compile tkiptun-ng, easside-ng, buddy-ng, buddy-ng-crawler, airventriloquist and wesside-ng. libpcap development package is also required to compile most of the tools. If not present, not all experimental tools will be built. On Cygwin, libpcap is not present and the Airpcap SDK replaces it. See –with-airpcap option above.
• with-ext-scripts: needed to build airoscript-ng, versuck-ng, airgraph-ng and airdrop-ng. Note: Each script has its own dependencies.
• with-gcrypt: Use libgcrypt crypto library instead of the default OpenSSL. And also use internal fast sha1 implementation (borrowed from GIT) Dependency (Debian): libgcrypt20-dev
• with-duma: Compile with DUMA support. DUMA is a library to detect buffer overruns and under-runs. Dependencies (debian): duma
• disable-libnl: Set-up the project to be compiled without libnl (1 or 3). Linux option only.
• without-opt: Do not enable stack protector (on GCC 4.9 and above).
• enable-shared: Make OSdep a shared library.
• disable-shared: When combined with enable-static, it will statically compile Aircrack-ng.
• with-avx512: On x86, add support for AVX512 instructions in aircrack-ng. Only use it when the current CPU supports AVX512.

Examples:

• Configure and compiling:

  ./configure --with-experimental
  make
  

• Compiling with gcrypt:

  ./configure --with-gcrypt
  make
  

• Installing:

  make install

• Installing (strip binaries):

  make install-strip

• Installing, with external scripts:

  ./configure --with-experimental --with-ext-scripts
  make
  make install
  

• Testing (with sqlite, experimental and pcre)

  ./configure --with-experimental
  make
  make check
  

• Compiling on OS X with macports (and all options):

  ./configure --with-experimental
  gmake
  

• Compiling on OS X 10.10 with XCode 7.1 and Homebrew:

  env CC=gcc-4.9 CXX=g++-4.9 ./configure
  make
  make check
  

  NOTE: Older XCode ships with a version of LLVM that does not support CPU feature detection; which causes the ./configure to fail. To work around this older LLVM, it is required that a different compile suite is used, such as GCC or a newer LLVM from Homebrew.

  If you wish to use OpenSSL from Homebrew, you may need to specify the location to its’ installation. To figure out where OpenSSL lives, run:

  brew --prefix openssl

  Use the output above as the DIR for --with-openssl=DIR in the ./configure line:

  env CC=gcc-4.9 CXX=g++-4.9 ./configure --with-openssl=DIR
  make
  make check
  

• Compiling on FreeBSD with better performance

  env CC=gcc7 CXX=g++7 ./configure
  gmake
  

• Compiling on Cygwin with Airpcap (assuming Airpcap devpack is unpacked in Aircrack-ng directory)

  cp -vfp Airpcap_Devpack/bin/x86/airpcap.dll src
  cp -vfp Airpcap_Devpack/bin/x86/airpcap.dll src/aircrack-osdep
  cp -vfp Airpcap_Devpack/bin/x86/airpcap.dll src/aircrack-crypto
  cp -vfp Airpcap_Devpack/bin/x86/airpcap.dll src/aircrack-util
  dlltool -D Airpcap_Devpack/bin/x86/airpcap.dll -d build/airpcap.dll.def -l Airpcap_Devpack/bin/x86/libairpcap.dll.a
  autoreconf -i
  ./configure --with-experimental --with-airpcap=$(pwd)
  make
  

Packaging

Automatic detection of CPU optimization is done at run time. This behavior is desirable when packaging Aircrack-ng (for a Linux or other distribution.)

Also, in some cases it may be desired to provide your own flags completely and not having the suite auto-detect a number of optimizations. To do this, add the additional flag --without-opt to the ./configure line:

./configure --without-opt

Using precompiled binaries

Linux/BSD

• Use your package manager to download aircrack-ng
• In most cases, they have an old version.

Windows

• Install the appropriate “monitor” driver for your card (standard drivers doesn’t work for capturing data).
• aircrack-ng suite is command line tools. So, you have to open a commandline Start menu -> Run... -> cmd.exe then use them
• Run the executables without any parameters to have help

Documentation

Documentation, tutorials, … can be found on https://aircrack-ng.org

See also manpages and the forum.

For further information check the README file