During a wireless penetration test you discover a WPA2-PSK access point, but there are no connected stations, so capturing the usual four-way handshake with airodump-ng is impractical. You decide to attempt the client-less PMKID attack instead. Which toolchain available on Kali Linux will both capture frames that contain the PMKID and convert the resulting capture into the hash format required by Hashcat's mode 22000?
Collect traffic in Kismet and export the log to cowpatty for PMKID extraction and cracking.
Use airodump-ng with the --write option, then run airdecap-ng to pull out the PMKID.
Record frames with tshark, generate a word list with crunch, and feed both directly into Hashcat.
Capture with hcxdumptool and convert the .pcapng using hcxpcapngtool to produce a mode 22000 hash.
The PMKID is delivered in the RSN (Robust Security Network) information element that the access point includes in certain management frames during an attempted association. A common workflow on Kali Linux is:
Deploy hcxdumptool (part of the hcxtools suite) to passively or actively capture 802.11 frames containing a PMKID and save them to a .pcapng file.
Feed that capture into hcxpcapngtool, which extracts the ESSID, MAC addresses, and PMKID and writes a Hashcat-ready hash in mode 22000 format. This produces an offline hash that you can attack with Hashcat without requiring any client to be connected.
airodump-ng with airdecap-ng focuses on traditional four-way handshakes, Kismet with cowpatty cannot output mode 22000 hashes, and tshark plus crunch does not automate PMKID extraction or formatting.
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