Greetings all,

I would like to report a minor issue with the Kali 1.0.6 distro, the live version.

I prefer using precalculated PMKs for trying to crack the vast majority of ESSIDs (http://www.renderlab.net/projects/WPA-tables/), but very often I come across an unconventional ESSID and have to build a custom database that already has the precalculated PMKs.

Along comes pyrit. When attempting to use pyrit to calculate PMKs, I sometimes get a segmentation fault when I try to process large dictionary files. "g0tmilk-wordlist" would be the perfect test case for this. The details on that file can be viewed here: http://blog.g0tmi1k.com/2011/06/dict...wordlists.html

The workaround that I have found is here: https://code.google.com/p/pyrit/issues/detail?id=76

The fix for this segmentation fault is very easy. You simply have to invoke the previous version of Python instead of the default version. The default version is 2.7.3. You can confirm this by typing "env python -V" into a terminal window. The workaround for this is to invoke Python 2.6. You would type something like, "/usr/bin/python2.6 /usr/bin/pyrit -i wordlist-file import_passwords". So far this seems to be working with the previously mentioned enormous wordlist file. At the time of this writing, I have successfully imported 4.5 billion passwords into pyrit's database.

If I am not mistaken, doesn't this error relate to the systems stack size? This is only a guess since this fault can be caused by any number of issues.

  • Low memory
  • Faulty Ram memory
  • Fetching huge data set from db using query (size of fetched data is more than swap mem)
  • wrong query / buggy code
  • having long loop (multiple recursion)


Is there any setting in the live version of Kali that can be tweaked in order to avoid these segmentation faults? In the meantime, I can just use Python, version 2.6.

If anyone here has come up with any other solutions to this issue, then please share them here.

Thank you.