Jens Steube
More info
- Country
- Germany
- Known for
- hashcat (2009), the PMKID attack on WPA/WPA2 (2018)
German developer behind hashcat, the tool that made the graphics card standard kit for password cracking.
Better known by the handle atom, Steube released hashcat in 2009 as a fast CPU cracker. The GPU variant, oclHashcat, followed soon after and showed what thousands of parallel cores do to a leaked hash database. The two were merged and open-sourced under the MIT licence in 2015. Today hashcat handles hundreds of hash formats and rule-based dictionary attacks that make most "creative" passwords depressingly predictable.
In 2018, while poking at WPA3, Steube noticed that WPA/WPA2 networks with roaming features leak a PMKID in the first EAPOL frame. That is enough to crack the network password offline — no waiting for a client to connect, no deauthenticating anyone. A by-product of hunting for bugs in the successor.