[SpookyZalost]

@darth: my wifi adapter is PCI-E X4... and it uses dual channel wireless AC up to 1.5gbps so... I think the limiting factor is more than likely to be either the signal it's self or the PCI-E bus, but I don't think they make PCI-E X16 wifi adapters roflol.

Besides getting the packets is the easy and low cost part, the hard part is decrypting them which is where the password breaking comes in.

brute forcing effectively does comparative analysis by guessing the password and comparing it to the output using known encryption methods like WPA2 and AES.

it knows how long the password is but not what the characters are basically.

for most passwords which are WPA 2 these days, that means figuring out the password is N characters long, and running each character sequence through A through Z, 0 through 9 and the most common special characters which routers accept.
checking the output by outputting it as WPA 2, and comparing it to the encrypted password from captured packets.
rinse and repeat until it matches and try it.

that's why avx sounds interesting, SIMD means doing multiple characters at once which saves cracking time.

it's not as fast as a man in the middle attach where you can just nab the unencrypted password but it's a lot more stealthy.