aircrack-ng: Open Source Compliance & Risk Management

What is aircrack-ng?

Aircrack-ng is a GPL-2.0-licensed suite of WiFi security auditing tools written in C, intended for network auditors, penetration testers, and compliance and risk management teams who assess wireless networks on hardware they control.

What it is

Aircrack-ng is a free and open-source collection of wireless security auditing utilities distributed as one suite. The project is written in C, carries the GPL-2.0 licence, and lives in the unix-family ecosystem: its continuous integration covers AlmaLinux, Alpine Linux, DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Kali Linux, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows. The registry files it under Business Software / Compliance & Risk Management, with 7,653 stars, 1,376 forks, and 462 open issues.

The concrete problem it addresses is fragmentation in wireless auditing work. Auditing, capture, and analysis tasks are normally spread across separate single-purpose wireless utilities, and the project's own topics — "suite", "audit", "wifi-security" — frame consolidation as the point. Aircrack-ng replaces the need to assemble and maintain that set of one-off tools by shipping them under a single name with a single distribution path. Its topic list also names hostapd and FreeRADIUS, the access-point and authentication components that wireless audits typically examine.

Key capabilities

Distributed as a suite rather than a single binary, with "suite" repeated as a repository topic.
Builds and is tested across a wide operating-system matrix: AlmaLinux, Alpine Linux, DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Kali Linux, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows.
Provides a PCRE-linked Linux build variant, tracked separately in the linux-pcre.yml workflow.
Publishes a container image to DockerHub under the aircrackng/git repository, tagged git.
Is packaged natively for Arch Linux (extra/x86_64), Debian stable and testing, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Homebrew.
Runs a static-analysis and quality gate set including Clang scan-build, Coverity Scan, PVS-Studio, Codespell, and a Style & Consistency workflow.
Is written in C under GPL-2.0, so it can be built, modified, and redistributed.

Who uses it and how

Compliance and risk management teams use it to audit wireless security posture, which is the registry category the project sits in.
Penetration testers working from Kali Linux have a supported build target, since Kali is one of the project's continuous integration platforms.
Auditors of hostapd access points and FreeRADIUS authentication deployments use the suite against those components, both named in the repository topics.
Mixed-fleet teams benefit from the single build matrix: macOS, Windows, four BSDs, and several Linux distributions are all tested targets.
Teams needing reproducible, scriptable runs can deploy the aircrackng/git Docker image instead of building from source.

Getting started

Install the distribution package — Arch Linux, Debian stable or testing, Fedora, Ubuntu, or Homebrew — or pull the published Docker image aircrackng/git. Project homepage: https://aircrack-ng.org.

How it compares

The registry facts for this project name no paid products that it replaces. No comparable alternative is named in the supplied facts either, so Aircrack-ng stands alone in this registry, and no side-by-side licence, hosting, or cost comparison can be drawn from the material available.

When to use it — and when not

Aircrack-ng is a community GPL-2.0 project: no vendor support contract, hosted service, or commercial backing is described in the facts, so teams that require a supported product with an accountable supplier should look elsewhere. The repository also shows 462 open issues, and the supplied README content is essentially continuous integration badges, so expect to work from the project homepage and external documentation rather than dense in-repo guidance. Self-directed auditors comfortable building or packaging their own tooling will get the most from it.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Aircrack-ng

Badges

GitHub CI

Others

Repository versions

Arch Linux package Debian package Docker Image Version (latest by date) Fedora package homebrew version Ubuntu package

Description

Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of tools to assess WiFi network security.

It focuses on different areas of WiFi security:

Monitoring: Packet capture and export of data to text files for further processing by third party tools.
Attacking: Replay attacks, deauthentication, fake access points and others via packet injection.
Testing: Checking WiFi cards and driver capabilities (capture and injection).
Cracking: WEP and WPA PSK (WPA 1 and 2).

All tools are command line which allows for heavy scripting. A lot of GUIs have taken advantage of this feature. It works primarily on Linux but also Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, as well as Solaris and even eComStation 2.

Building

Requirements

Autoconf
Automake
Libtool
shtool
OpenSSL development package or libgcrypt development package.
Airmon-ng (Linux) requires ethtool, usbutils, and often pciutils.
On Windows, cygwin has to be used and it also requires w32api package.
On Windows, if using clang, libiconv and libiconv-devel
Linux: LibNetlink 1 or 3. It can be disabled by passing --disable-libnl to configure.
pkg-config (pkgconf on FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD)
FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and OS X with Macports: gmake
Linux/Cygwin: make and Standard C++ Library development package (Debian: libstdc++-dev)

Note: Airmon-ng only requires pciutils if the system has a PCI/PCIe bus and it is populated. Such bus can be present even if not physically visible. For example, it is present, and populated on the Raspberry Pi 4, therefore pciutils is required on that device.

Optional stuff

If you want SSID filtering with regular expression in airodump-ng (--essid-regex) PCRE or PCRE2 development package is required.
If you want to use airolib-ng and '-r' option in aircrack-ng, SQLite development package >= 3.3.17 (3.6.X version or better is recommended)
If you want to use Airpcap, the 'developer' directory from the CD/ISO/SDK is required.
In order to build besside-ng, besside-ng-crawler, easside-ng, tkiptun-ng and wesside-ng, libpcap development package is required (on Cygwin, use the Airpcap SDK instead; see above)
rfkill
If you want Airodump-ng to log GPS coordinates, gpsd is needed
For best performance on SMP machines, ensure the hwloc library and headers are installed. It is strongly recommended on high core count systems, it may give a serious speed boost
CMocka and expect for testing
For integration testing on Linux only: tcpdump, HostAPd, WPA Supplicant and screen

Installing required and optional dependencies

Below are instructions for installing the basic requirements to build aircrack-ng for a number of operating systems.

Note: CMocka, tcpdump, screen, HostAPd and WPA Supplicant should not be dependencies when packaging Aircrack-ng.

Linux

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -Sy base-devel libnl openssl ethtool util-linux zlib libpcap sqlite pcre2 hwloc cmocka hostapd wpa_supplicant tcpdump screen iw usbutils pciutils expect

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev libssl-dev ethtool shtool rfkill zlib1g-dev libpcap-dev libsqlite3-dev libpcre2-dev libhwloc-dev libcmocka-dev hostapd wpasupplicant tcpdump screen iw usbutils expect

Fedora

sudo yum install libtool pkgconfig sqlite-devel autoconf automake openssl-devel libpcap-devel pcre2-devel rfkill libnl3-devel gcc gcc-c++ ethtool hwloc-devel libcmocka-devel make file expect hostapd wpa_supplicant iw usbutils tcpdump screen zlib-devel expect

CentOS/RHEL 7

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo ./centos_autotools.sh
# Remove older installation of automake/autoconf
sudo yum remove autoconf automake
sudo yum install sqlite-devel openssl-devel libpcap-devel pcre2-devel rfkill libnl3-devel ethtool hwloc-devel libcmocka-devel make file expect hostapd wpa_supplicant iw usbutils tcpdump screen zlib-devel

Note: autoconf, automake, libtool, and pkgconfig in the repositories are too old. The script centos_autotools.sh automatically installs

Frequently asked questions

Is aircrack-ng free to use?

aircrack-ng is open source under the GPL-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does aircrack-ng do?

WiFi security auditing tools suite

What is aircrack-ng written in?

aircrack-ng is primarily written in C. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/aircrack-ng/aircrack-ng, and it has 7,654 GitHub stars.