Seeking help with slow hashing speeds
#1
Hello all,
I'm currently learning about penetration testing and playing around with hashcat.  I'm getting pretty abysmal speeds though and can't figure out why.

I'm basically testing a WPA handshake that I captured from my lab wifi router box.  I downloaded hashcat 3.10 and I'm currently trying to use the rockyou dictionary file.  I read that using rules would enable it to run faster but that doesn't seem to be the case for me.

I have a GTX 970 video card, and using the best64 rule or the d3ad0ne rules both only give me ~170 kH/s.  Yet, I can benchmark at over 10.5 MH/s

This is the command I'm running:


hashcat32.exe -m 2500 -r ./rules/base64.rule ./handshake.hccap ./rockyou.txt

It tells me this is going to take almost 2 hours estimated.  And the d3ad0ne rule is even worse, it estimates 31 days (but gets the save average speed.

Am I doing something wrong here?  Is there something I can do to bump the speed up a bit?  I understand from reading that dictionary attacks aren't best suited for GPU hashing, but surely I should be able to get better than a paltry 170 kH/s??

Thanks!
#2
The 170 kH/s sounds about right for WPA with a GTX970. Not sure where you got the 10.5 MH/s from, but not from WPA. To test it, run: hashcat32.exe -b -m 2500

And of course it takes longer if you use a rule. It multiplies the keyspace with the number of rules in the rulefile.