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Linux|Lounge: At first, thanks for taking the time for the interview!

Who are you and what is your relationship to the aircrack-ng project?

Mister_X: I'm Thomas d'Otreppe de Bouvette. I'm from Belgium and I work as an IT consultant but nothing related to aircrack-ng. So I work on aircrack-ng during my freetime. I am the author of aircrack-ng. I created the project 3 years ago, in february 2006, when Devine disappeared from the aircrack project and I wanted to continue to work on aircrack to improve it a bit for me, but I thought it was a good idea to share the project with the community. Aircrack-ng is actually based on the original aircrack.

Linux|Lounge: Aircrack-ng has finally released its first major version. What are its key features?

Mister_X: That really depends if you were following the project, not much compared to rc4 but a lot of changes compared to the latest stable. A few programs have been added (airserv-ng, airolib-ng, tkiptun-ng, and airdecloak-ng, ...), others have been improved (new options, new drivers supported, compilation on several OSes... and architectures, etc.), and many bugs have been fixed. There is now a library called "osdep" (src/osdep directory) for capturing/injecting 802.11 frames without having to care about the difference on different OSes and the drivers used. It can do networking and more. Compared to the latest stable we now can capture the WPA handshake with airbase-ng without needing the access points, you just need the client. In aircrack-ng we have the PTW2 attack. It was already in 0.9 but in 1.0 it was slightly improved. With this attack you need much less packets than with the other attacks to crack the WEP key. On the other side, Aircrack-ng is not only for attacking, you can also use it to do audits.

Airgraph-ng, by TheX1le, for example shows the relationship between the clients and the access points, you can see what client is connected to what access points, there different networks it probed.

GISKismet, by jabra, is a wireless recon visualization tool which can handle data gathered using Kismet and stores them in an SQLite database and features kml-Exports for Google Earth.

Linux|Lounge: What is next in the aircrack-ng project. Will you take some time off or are you eager to hit the aircrack-ng roadmap?

Mister_X: Next in the aircrack-ng series will be version 1.1 containg, as usual, bug fixes. It should also finally have support for airpcap devices and some support for OSX, natively. We are also working on improving the WPA handshake detection and fixing capture/injection on BSD.

I'm holding a workshop about "Wireless auditing" at Brucon in less than 2 weeks in which i'll tackle different scenarios during an audit of WiFi networks, including the use of CUDA and FPGA to accelerate bruteforcing.