According to my research, the most common WPA/WPA2 WiFi attack requires a chipse

Question

According to my research, the most common WPA/WPA2 WiFi attack requires a chipset capable of packet injection.

However I am not sure what this is, and what purpose it serves once you have the capability to inject packets.

I thought that all WiFi chipsets could send/receive data, and assumed packet injection would come under the sending protocol(whatever that may be) - but I must be missing something as only certain cards can apparently inject packets.
What is the need and purpose of packet injection within WiFi attacks?

Explanation / Answer

Hardware-wise all cards can send and receive radio packets on Wi-Fi frequencies.

The problem is that the cards have a firmware that controls all the low-level stuff, like frequency-hopping, etc... for example when your computer requests to scan all available networks it doesn't manually tune the card to each frequency, listen on it and repeats the process for each channel; instead it just tells the card to scan and the firmware takes care of the rest.

Some cards have a more permissive firmware (Atheros is probably the best one in this case) that allows to transmit (injection) and listen (monitor) without being associated (connected and authenticated) to a network beforehand, whereas others won't allow you to do such things until you connect to the network you're attacking, which is of course impossible because you don't yet have the key.

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