Aircrack-ng
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Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of tools to assess WiFi network security, covering monitoring, attacking, testing, and cracking WEP and WPAWPAA Wi-Fi authentication and encryption standard maintained by the Wi-Fi Alliance, replacing WEP; cyber tools target it to audit wireless network credentials and key exchange handshakes. PSK.
Summary
Aircrack-ng is an open-source suite of command-line tools for testing Wi-Fi network security, covering monitoring, packet capturepacket captureA packet capture, recorded network packets that can be inspected later. Analysts use it to reconstruct communication and investigate protocol behavior or suspicious traffic., and cracking WEP and WPA/WPA2 keys. It runs as a set of separate utilities you chain together on the command line: one puts a wireless adapter into monitor mode, another discovers nearby access points and clients, and another recovers a WPA key from a captured handshake. This workflow makes it suited to penetration testers and red teamers auditing wireless networks rather than to defenders monitoring them, and its documentation describes it as a suite spanning attack and cracking rather than a single scanner. First committed in 2006 and maintained by 82 contributors, it has seen only 5 commits in the past year, so development has slowed considerably even though the tool remains widely used.
Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of tools to assess WiFi network security, covering monitoring, attacking, testing, and cracking WEP and WPA PSK.
How Aircrack-ng helps
Which access points and clients are actually broadcasting nearby?
puts a wireless adapter into monitor mode and lists in-range networks and their connected clients, along with the channel and signal each was seen on | which is the reconnaissance step before any capture or attack begins
Which of the captured packets actually contains a usable WPA handshake?
inspects a saved capture for the four-way handshake frames and reports whether a crackable one is present rather than treating any traffic as valid, rejecting files that are not 802.11 wireless captures at all
Is this Wi-Fi password actually crack able from what was captured?
runs the recovered handshake or WEP data against a wordlist or key-space search and reports the key if one matches
Are the access points around this site still running weak WEP encryption?
applies WEP-specific statistical key-recovery attacks to captured packets and returns the key once enough weakly-encrypted packets have been gathered
Would a previous capture session block a rerun before I notice anything is wrong?
checks for an existing session file at the same path and refuses to overwrite it, exiting with an explicit error instead of silently repeating or losing work
Languages
Command line
No command matches.
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for Aircrack-ng, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail Aircrack-ng puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
41 entries
No entries match these filters.
- May 20221
- January 20201
- December 20181
- September 20181
- July 20181
- April 20182
- February 20161
- November 20151
- April 20151
- October 20141
- May 20131
- April 20101
- July 20091
- March 20091
- January 20091
- June 20081
- February 20082
- October 20071
- May 20071
- April 20071
- January 20071
- October 20061
- August 20061
- June 20061
- May 20061
- April 20062
- March 20062
- November 20052
- August 20052
- July 20053
- June 20052
- October 20041
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in aircrack-ng/aircrack-ng, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 2 −1 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +1 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close < 1 day first maintainer reply 1 hour
- Open backlog 414 of 2,313 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 414
- Contributors / month 1
- Commits / month 5
- Stars 7,659
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Articles
1 article · updated Nov 4, 2026Where Aircrack-ng turns up in what others publish: how-tos, attack reports that name it, and incident write-ups. A row says why it is here and quotes where the article names it; the link goes to the publisher.
Tutorials & guides 1
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Wireless Penetration Testing: Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is not a tool, but it is a suite of tools that all perform different types of attacks or activities related to Wireless Access Points.
2 more quotes
In this demonstration, we will be focusing on a few of the tools from the Aircrack-ng arsenal.
With the help of Aircrack-ng, a penetration tester can focus on Monitoring, Attacking, Testing, and Cracking aspects of the Wi-Fi Security.
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