Which of the following is an example of a wireless cracking tool?

• A. Aircrack-ng
• B. Nmap
• C. Wireshark
• D. Firesheep

Answer: (A)

The concept being tested is recognizing which tool is used to break wireless encryption. Aircrack-ng is built specifically for this purpose: it is a suite that cracks WEP and WPA/WPA2 keys after data has been captured, using offline attacks such as analyzing IVs for WEP or performing dictionary/brute-force attempts for WPA-PSK. It’s commonly used as part of a workflow that includes capturing packets with airodump-ng and injecting frames with aireplay-ng, then running aircrack-ng to recover the key.

Nmap, by contrast, is a network scanner used to discover hosts and services, not to crack encryption keys. Wireshark is a packet analyzer that lets you inspect traffic, but it doesn’t perform key cracking. Firesheep is a tool aimed at session hijacking on open wifi networks rather than cracking encryption keys.