After update, Fern WiFi Cracker stops whilst bruteforcing.

[VirtualProfessor]

Installed 2018.4 and Fern was working fine.
Saw there were a lot of updates so I succumbed and now Fern just stops whilst in the bruteforcing phase. Re-run and it will stop, but not necessarily at the same point in the dictionary.
I see that aircrack-ng was updated to 1.5.2, could this be causing the problem?

[Mister_X]

Could you explain the different steps to reproduce the issue as well as the values you input, and choices that you make.

Without any of that, it is not possible to say if the aircrack-ng update is the cause or not.

[VirtualProfessor]

Fern is a GUI which automatically calls aireplay-ng, airodump-ng, and aircrack-ng so you don't see any of the parameters being passed.
As far as I can tell, aircrack-ng is the only updated package used by Fern and the changelog mentions "Aircrack-ng: Reworked wordlist producer/consumer queue".
The bruteforcing phase uses the wordlist, so that's why I ended up there.
Fern works well in each of the other phases, it just stops part way through the bruteforcing

[bigbiz]

Fern is a GUI which automatically calls aireplay-ng, airodump-ng, and aircrack-ng so you don't see any of the parameters being passed.
As far as I can tell, aircrack-ng is the only updated package used by Fern and the changelog mentions "Aircrack-ng: Reworked wordlist producer/consumer queue".
The bruteforcing phase uses the wordlist, so that's why I ended up there.
Fern works well in each of the other phases, it just stops part way through the bruteforcing

Are you sure it stopped or are you looking at the redbar at bottom of screen? It may still be cracking just the gui is lagging.

[Mister_X]

Does it happen every time or only from time to time?

What is the resulting aircrack-ng command from Fern so it can be reproduced?

[VirtualProfessor]

"Are you sure it stopped or are you looking at the redbar at bottom of screen? It may still be cracking just the gui is lagging. "

It has definitely stopped. The red bar is part way across and the rapidly changing current password attempt is static.
The main window status indicator has changed from Active to Stopped.
Each attempt (on the same target) has stopped at a different point.


"Does it happen every time or only from time to time?"

Every time so far.

"What is the resulting aircrack-ng command from Fern so it can be reproduced?"

I can't see the aircrack-ng command, it all happens in the background somewhere

[bigbiz]

I havent used fern in a while but sometime when I use it, it does this to. Did you update fern from the update button at the gui mainpage. I always figured it was gui lag. Sometimes it was starting a wifi handshake capture and i never instructed it to. So very unpredictable.

[VirtualProfessor]

"Did you update fern from the update button at the gui mainpage."

First time I ran it there was an available update indicated so I hit the button. I'm pretty sure that it ran fine after the update ...
Then I decided to update Kali

Just did another run ...
The Active to Stopped was a red herring, this happens when you hit the Attack button on the Attack Panel.

Activity proceeded as before and the Bruteforcing ran happily (at ~9500k/s) for 16 minutes then stopped (at a different point in the dictionary than previous times).
Running System Monitor showed it consuming 43% of CPU and regularly writing to /tmp, so it is not totally hung.

Maybe I'll just re-install 2018.4 and forget about updating Kali ...