Aircrack-ng is a suite of tools that allow penetration testers to test the security of wireless networks. The suite includes tools that perform the following tasks related to wireless penetration testing:

• Monitoring: These are tools designed specifically to capture traffic for later analysis. We will see in greater depth the ability of the Aircrack-ng tools to capture wireless traffic that we can use on other third-party software, such as Wireshark, to examine.
• Attacking: These tools are available to attack target networks. They include tools that allow for de-authentication attacks and replay attacks that take advantage of Aircrack-ng's ability to conduct packet injections, whereby Aircrack-ng actually sends packets into the wireless data stream to both clients and the access point as part of the attack.
• Testing: These tools allow for the testing of wireless capabilities in hardware such as wireless cards.
• Cracking: The Aircrack-ng toolset also has the capability to crack wireless pre-shared keys found in the WEP, WPA, and WP2.

In addition to the command-line tools, Aircrack-ng is used in a number of GUI-based tools. Having a solid understanding of how Aircrack-ng works will provide a solid foundation to the use of other tools we will explore later on in this chapter.