Replication Package for: “Beyond Hardware Acceleration: A Heuristic Decision Framework for Optimizing WPA2 Dictionary Attacks”

This repository contains the source code, datasets, and supplementary materials required to reproduce the empirical and synthetic experiments presented in the article “Beyond Hardware Acceleration: A Heuristic Decision Framework for Optimizing WPA2 Dictionary Attacks” by Oleksii Chalyi.

Abstract of the associated article: The computationally intensive nature of offline dictionary attacks against the WPA2 protocol remains a persistent challenge in wireless security. While conventional approaches primarily focus on scaling hardware acceleration, this study shifts the focus toward the heuristic structural optimization and spatial sorting of static baseline dictionaries. This research systematically evaluates five heuristic wordlist structuring techniques, Alphabetical, Reverse Alphabetical, Length, N-gram, and a novel Structural method, through a three-stage experimental pipeline. This framework assists digital forensics practitioners in practically selecting a sorting heuristic according to the target’s OSINT profile, the dictionary scale, and the required balance between offline preparation cost and execution time. 

Repository Contents:

• Code.zip: Python scripts used for wordlist preprocessing, target extraction, synthetic string-matching simulations, and real-world Hashcat execution.

• Datasets_and_Summary.zip: CSV files containing the raw and aggregated empirical results (Time-to-Crack metrics).

• Processed_Dictionaries.zip: Validation dictionaries and the generated heuristically sorted wordlists.

• targets_hc22000.zip: Generated .hc22000 hash files used during the GPU-accelerated cracking phase.

• rockyou_extracted_targets.txt: The isolated list of the 600 specific target passwords categorized into six structural groups.

• README.md: Detailed methodological pipeline, execution instructions, and third-party dataset acknowledgments.

Please refer to the README.md file for complete execution instructions and system requirements.