i ve been messing around cracking my wpa key with backtrack 3. is wpa really that secure? is there a program that will crack a wpa key with out using a word list? still a beginner here, but not a completly. also i am only able to find tutorials for wireless cracking with backtrack 3. is that all it's really good for? if so what else would you suggest? thanks alot.

WEP and WPA are not secure, WPA2 is said to be secure at this point.

You can do some other things with Backtrack 3 despite wireless stuff. Also note that Backtrack 4 was released not too long ago.

Which programs have you used so far?

to start off... thanks for the help guys. im downloading backtrack 4 right now. with backtrack 3 i have only really used the wireless hacking tools like airmon-ng, airodump-ng, etc... i saw a thing on youtube were they were sniffing pictures and one where someone cracked and ftp password with a word list. thats all the questions i had for the moment i guess. thanks again.

WPA with AES is still pretty good, WPA with TKIP has issues
WPA2 is the current best offerings.

As with all things, if you use a simple password, its going to be popable by a decent wordlist.

Cracking WPA is based on the SSID and the password / passphrase. The best thing about WPA cracking is you grab the handshake and away you go, not like the old days of WEP cracking.

Rainbow tables speed things up alot, so this is something worth looking at also.
I have recently been looking into CUDA, and I am planning on doing something with this in the lab soon, and will most likely write a blog post on it. Should see at least a 5x increase in cracking speed.

The BackTrack distro has many many tools, and everything has been compiled to be interoperable, its really worth a look. Wireless attack is just one function possible.

As with everything, given enough knowledge and time, anything can be popped in theory.

Happy learning.