a question about wpa password hashes

[LoganTheBogan]

pardon me if this is a frustratingly noob question, I don't have a very in depth knowledge of cryptography.

when you get the hash from a wpa handshake you get a piece of data in the format 00:00:00:00:00:00, with each of the zeros representing a hex value. you can then use this information to do an offline bruteforce or smart attack against the essid. my math tells me that there are only 281,474,976,710,656 possible hashes a handshake can produce, but there are 95^63 possible pass phrases for wpa. does that mean that there are multiple pass phrases that can be used on any wpa-psk? i imagine the answer to that question is no, but if somebody could tell me why they would be doing me a big favour.

[scottm99]

If you're using pre-shared key, then only 1 passphrase can be used at a time (the same one has to be entered on all devices connecting to the LAN). Since a passphrase can be anything, I would assume there would be an infinite number of possible passphrases. To quote the wikipedia entry on passphrases "This key may be entered either as a string of 64 hexadecimal digits, or as a passphrase of 8 to 63 printable ASCII characters. If ASCII characters are used, the 256 bit key is calculated by applying the PBKDF2 key derivation function to the passphrase, using the SSID as the salt and 4096 iterations of HMAC-SHA1." I'd suggest looking at the wikipedia entry for WPA for more info.