Hashcat Benchmark
Benchmarking provides an estimate of the speed
of the GPUs and/or CPUs when cracking different hashes.
This allows us to estimate how long hashcat will take
to go through a wordlist
and how to best combine the different processing units available.
This further helps us estimate the cost of cracking,
which is especially important when using a cloud instance
where we are billed by the hour.
The hashcat -b option without parameters benchmarks all hash modes.
However,
doing so is very time consuming
as hashcat has 323 hash modes at the time of this recording.
The --help option lists
all the hash modes and we can identify which one to specifically benchmark.
In our case, we are only interested in “WPA/WPA2 EAPOL” hashes,
and we can benchmark this mode with -m 2500.
Hashcat first compiles its kernels
to optimize the algorithm and then runs the benchmark.
Hashcat estimates the CPU will be able to test
8,722 passphrases per second.