Tables and WPA: Quick Question

[Lancerguy]

I am not entirely sure how to explain this. After researching WPA cracking shortcuts like using airolib to pre-generate password/essid combination hashes, I was interested in generating a table I could use to reduce the time of cracking, however, am I misunderstanding that there is a table I can compute BESIDES one containing dictionary passwords/essids to shorten the process? Something to do with the PMK or PTK?

I may be totally wrong on this, like I said, I've been doing a lot of research and there are several different things floating around in my head right now. I thought it would be better to just ask to clear my thinking a little.

I just thought that because the SSID is used as a salt, there were some tables I could calculate before it got to the password part, so that it only has to do half the work (or something like that) because it generates a PMK first, then from that it gens the PTK, etc (that may be backwards...)

BTW, I have read a couple of other threads relating to rainbow tables or to airolib here on the forums, but I didnt' feel like it clarified my question.

Thanks,
Gareth

[imported_=Tron=]

Well the ESSID is essentially used as the salt, which is why the pre-calculated hash lookup table only will work for the exact ESSID(s) that it was computed for. There is no real shortcut to computing the hashes, or actually the lookup-table is the shortcut as the hashes have been calculated prior to testing the passphrases against the handshake.

[Lancerguy]

Thanks, I guess my confusion was just that many people seem to want to calculate large tables based on many ssids and a dictionary, where as my approach is going to be to create a table based on the single ssid in question, and I would probably generate the table based on a brute force attack. I am testing out my PS3's processing power on generating rainbow tables this weekend, and I wanted to make sure I was going in the right direction

Thanks for the help,
Gareth

[Thorn]

Thanks, I guess my confusion was just that many people seem to want to calculate large tables based on many ssids and a dictionary, where as my approach is going to be to create a table based on the single ssid in question, and I would probably generate the table based on a brute force attack. I am testing out my PS3's processing power on generating rainbow tables this weekend, and I wanted to make sure I was going in the right direction

Thanks for the help,
Gareth

The question is always one of the Time vs. Memory Tradeoff. Theprez98 posted some test results in this thread in regards to generating and using WPA Rainbow Tables with CoWPAtty, and a good discussion follows.