[HN Gopher] FragAttacks: new security vulnerabilities that affec...
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FragAttacks: new security vulnerabilities that affect wi-fi devices
 
Author : sylvainkalache
Score  : 317 points
Date   : 2021-05-11 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
 
web link (www.fragattacks.com)
w3m dump (www.fragattacks.com)
 
| tptacek wrote:
| From the researcher that brought you KRACK:
| 
| https://www.krackattacks.com/
 
| colinbr96 wrote:
| Would using a VPN prevent the malicious DNS packet?
 
  | swiley wrote:
  | Authenticating the remote end of the connection (which all
  | decent software does because using it on other people's WiFi
  | would be very unsafe otherwise) makes it irrelevant.
 
    | throwitaway12 wrote:
    | Could you elaborate on this?
    | 
    | I, too, would like to know the definitive answer to this, as
    | I feel like a malicious DNS packet was used against a
    | computer of mine before connected to the VPN.
    | 
    | Very serious attack...
 
| transpute wrote:
| Future Wi-Fi devices will be able to see through your home and
| business walls, for activity monitoring and biometric
| identification,
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/wifi_devices_monitori...
| 
|  _> In three years or so, the Wi-Fi specification is scheduled to
| get an upgrade that will turn wireless devices into sensors
| capable of gathering data about the people and objects bathed in
| their signals... When 802.11bf will be finalized and introduced
| as an IEEE standard in September 2024, Wi-Fi will cease to be a
| communication-only standard and will legitimately become a full-
| fledged sensing paradigm... tracking can be done surreptitiously
| because Wi-Fi signals can penetrate walls, don 't require light,
| and don't offer any visible indicator of their presence._
| 
| IEEE 802.11bf paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14918
| 
| Papers on device-free wireless sensing (DFWS):
| https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/
| 
| Remote sensing with low-cost ESP32 and 802.11n:
| https://academic.oup.com/jcde/article/7/5/644/5837600
 
  | beermonster wrote:
  | And let's not forget also Amazon Sidewalk
  | 
  | Scary times.
 
    | doggodaddo78 wrote:
    | Yup.
    | 
    | Even radiuz was probably better.
    | 
    | https://wifinetnews.com/archives/2004/06/radiuz_combines_wpa.
    | ..
 
    | swiley wrote:
    | Only if you tolerate devices with non-free software.
 
      | ethbr0 wrote:
      | Like any TV?
 
        | swiley wrote:
        | Yeah or anything else with non-free firmware.
 
        | doggodaddo78 wrote:
        | So, everything practical.
 
        | neolog wrote:
        | Commercial displays are a solution here, though they're
        | expensive.
 
        | danielheath wrote:
        | Expensive compared to the advertising-subsidised consumer
        | version, maybe.
 
        | ethbr0 wrote:
        | Expensive compared to retail- _volume_ models. This is
        | also a fight against manufacturing economies of scale.
 
    | FridayoLeary wrote:
    | Is that some sort of hatch in the pavement? You order
    | something on Prime, and moments later, a slab embossed with
    | Amazons' logo opens, a deliveryperson jumps out and deposits
    | the package into your outstretched arm.
 
      | doggodaddo78 wrote:
      | Almost. It's anyone with Amazon IoTs sharing wifi with each
      | other.
 
  | salawat wrote:
  | This is one of those things that shouldn't even have a standard
  | made for it.
  | 
  | What does everyone think is going to happen with capabilities
  | like that?
 
    | quickthrowman wrote:
    | Yeah, this tech standard is totally insane, why would I want
    | anyone or anything to be able to scan people and objects
    | inside my house without my knowledge? I'm aware of microphone
    | attacks for keyboard password entry and other methods of
    | surreptitious surveillance, but this is way past a microphone
    | or webcam. I will pay a massive premium to purchase WiFi
    | equipment without this feature.
    | 
    | Unfortunately these will be everywhere, far beyond any
    | existing camera surveillance network.
 
      | transpute wrote:
      | It's also passive. Someone can stand outside your house
      | with their device and "illuminate" your activity inside the
      | house. Only EMF shielding in the walls can block them.
 
    | transpute wrote:
    | Good news, the paper mentions privacy.
    | 
    |  _> We identify a number of critical issues that need to be
    | addressed in this space... First, individuals should be
    | provided the opportunity to opt out of SENS services - in
    | other words, to avoid being monitored and tracked by the Wi-
    | Fi devices around them._
    | 
    | Bad news, the paper proposes remote human identification by
    | every Wi-Fi device.
    | 
    |  _> This would require the widespread introduction of
    | reliable SENS algorithm for human or animal identification._
    | 
    | Would opt-in be legally easier than requiring human body scan
    | registration for opt-out of Wi-Fi remote sensing?
 
      | brobdingnagians wrote:
      | It would be better to have a beacon that simply broadcasts
      | that you do not want to be tracked, with no further
      | identifying features. There isn't really a good reason for
      | identifying you to then look up that you don't want to be
      | tracked. Make that legally binding and enforce it.
      | 
      | Or, better yet, make it totally opt in.
 
        | farrelmahaztra wrote:
        | How would opt-in work in practice? Say, if this gets
        | pushed out on $CAFE public wifi for analytics. Would it
        | be something akin to "tick this consent box to use the
        | wifi"?
        | 
        | And if $CAFE tracks you regardless of you not ticking the
        | box or connecting to the network, how do I detect that as
        | a regular customer?
 
  | neolog wrote:
  | Is it practical to put a Faraday mesh into the exterior walls
  | of a house?
 
    | farrelmahaztra wrote:
    | In addition to that, you might want/need to use only wired
    | connections to your router and rip out any components that
    | enable wireless.
 
    | FridayoLeary wrote:
    | With 2 conditions; a) you would have to do it _before_
    | closing up the walls and b) give up on radio.
 
| johnklos wrote:
| I think this will make for an excellent litmus test for companies
| that make wifi products. Is this a critical fix? No. Is it
| important, if not critical? Yes.
| 
| Some vendors aren't going to care about this in the least and
| won't offer any updates.
| 
| Some will only fix this in new and future devices.
| 
| And perhaps some will update all their devices going back several
| years.
| 
| Currently I buy used 802.11ac Airport Extremes for wireless for
| people because they're simple, they stay out of the way, and the
| last time there was a major update, Apple updated every Airport
| model all the way back to the Airport Express from 2008.
| 
| But I want to be able to buy new wifi devices, and how vendors
| handle this will inform me about which ones I'll buy going
| forward.
 
| jtchang wrote:
| I wonder if hardcoding your DNS servers will help. I guess
| sometimes this is not possible because in corporate environments
| DNS servers are sent via DHCP.
 
  | beermonster wrote:
  | " More technically, the impact of attacks can also be reduced
  | by manually configuring your DNS server so that it cannot be
  | poisoned. Specific to your Wi-Fi configuration, you can
  | mitigate attacks (but not fully prevent them) by disabling
  | fragmentation, disabling pairwise rekeys, and disabling dynamic
  | fragmentation in Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) devices."
  | 
  | So yes, but as you say lots of things can override your
  | explicit DNS settings. Even browsers can do it these days.
  | 
  | Run WireGuard. Effectively treat WiFi as untrusted and VPN over
  | it. Have WireGuard send over your DNS on the other side, and
  | have that DNS use D-o-T or D-o-H depending on your threat
  | model.
  | 
  | Use Ethernet on stationary devices, and WiFi on mobile devices.
 
| Reventlov wrote:
| Mathy strikes again ! This has been fixed in Linux and certain
| firmware / driver already: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-
| wireless/20210511180259.159598...
 
  | beermonster wrote:
  | So these patches are for " Linux IEEE 802.11 implementation
  | (mac80211)" and ath10k/ath11k.
 
  | DanAtC wrote:
  | Only because they agreed to sit on the patches for an
  | inordinate amount of time.
  | 
  | Theo de Raadt did the right thing for KRACK. Shame it would be
  | his only chance to do so before getting kicked out of Mathy
  | Vanhoef's secret club.
 
    | wing-_-nuts wrote:
    | I'm out of the loop. Expand?
 
      | spijdar wrote:
      | From someone mostly out of the drama loop, here's my brief
      | recollection:
      | 
      | Generally in the security sphere we consider it the most
      | ethical and responsible to give vendors plenty of time to
      | patch vulnerabilities, especially critical ones, before
      | publishing details or anything that could lead to a working
      | 0-day exploit.
      | 
      | Theo de Raadt was one of the people notified of a previous
      | WiFi exploit, and there was a set length of time intended
      | for the vulnerability to be made private, in order for the
      | (inordinately slow) vendors to create and push/prepare
      | patches. If the patches were released early, it'd be easy
      | to determine what the original vulnerability was.
      | 
      | So, Theo de Raadt decided, in the interest of keeping
      | OpenBSD secure, to push the patch early, effectively
      | letting the whole cat out of the bag. I'm not going to get
      | into the drama of whether that was right, wrong, foolish,
      | wise, whatever, but because of that, he no longer receives
      | these ahead-of-time notifications of vulnerabilities.
 
        | anjbe wrote:
        | There are at least two things wrong with this comment.
        | First, OpenBSD did not push the patch earlier than
        | agreed. Second, OpenBSD did not push the patch without
        | permission.
        | 
        | Mathy originally reported the vulnerability to OpenBSD on
        | July 15 under embargo, and estimated it would be lifted
        | by the end of August (1.5 months after disclosure). Theo
        | argued that 1.5 months was too long, but didn't push the
        | patch. Then on August 14, Mathy said the final public
        | disclosure date would be October 16 ( _three_ months
        | after initial disclosure), but agreed to allow OpenBSD to
        | patch early. Although he didn't like it, and has since
        | said he would not give such permission again, he agrees
        | that OpenBSD did commit with his permission.
        | 
        | Direct quote from Mathy: "From my point of view, I sent
        | one mail on 14 August where I mentioned the new
        | disclosure date of 16 Oct. In that same mail I also gave
        | the OK to quietly commit a fix."
        | https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=152909822107104&w=2
        | 
        | People portray OpenBSD as a project that ignores
        | embargoes, and point to KRACK as an example. But Theo
        | _didn't_ ignore the KRACK embargo. Rather, Theo
        | successfully persuaded Mathy to allow OpenBSD to patch
        | the vulnerability a full month and a half after all
        | vendors had been informed.
        | 
        | I'm commenting on this because I think simply pushing
        | back against the length of an embargo should not be
        | characterized as breaking an embargo.
        | 
        | There were a lot of vendors in the KRACK embargo. The
        | risk of the vulnerability leaking to the black market or
        | malicious governments is real. As the length of the
        | embargo increases, this risk increases dramatically. Big
        | vendors are incentivized to pressure researchers to
        | extend the embargo as long as possible. Open source
        | projects are forced to hold off on committing bugfixes,
        | leaving their users potentially vulnerable. If a project
        | pushes back against a long embargo, or through persuasion
        | manages to finagle permission to release an unobtrusive
        | fix "early," that project is characterized as an
        | untrustworthy embargo breaker and left out of future
        | embargoes. So open source projects are incentivized to
        | sit down, shut up, ignore the threat to their users, and
        | let the big vendors dawdle in their bugfixes.
 
        | spijdar wrote:
        | Thanks for the clarification/correction.
        | 
        | I have just one more thought on the matter. I'm still
        | early in my career, but in the years I've spent so far
        | working with small business-types on security, and
        | watching my colleagues, a month and a half is practically
        | no time at all. I have little love for the big vendors,
        | especially for behavior like this, but the reality I've
        | seen is they often take months to do anything, and it
        | takes further months for customers to actually patch
        | their systems.
        | 
        | So I'm a little sympathetic to the desire to have an
        | embargo of half a year or even longer, even with the
        | downsides mentioned. Still, Theo clearly didn't actually
        | breach his trust with Mathy, that's my mistake.
 
        | josephg wrote:
        | > a month and a half is practically no time at all
        | 
        | A month and a half is plenty of time, but it requires (1)
        | the company decides that fixing security bugs is top
        | priority. (2) They need a senior engineer or two on hand
        | who are smart enough to understand the issues involved
        | and implement a fix. And (3) They need a decent release
        | process which allows security fixes to be promptly rolled
        | out to users.
        | 
        | I'm not sure where most companies fail here. It's
        | certainly easy to downplay and deprioritize security
        | fixes from the inside, when you have a big deadline
        | coming up, or your customers are yelling at you or a
        | refactor is blocking other people from doing their job.
        | Security issues from the inside never feel like the "all
        | hands on deck" emergency situations that security
        | researchers believe them to be. (And I'm not sure if this
        | is right or wrong, just, the experience I've always had
        | from the ground when security issues potentially affected
        | _us_.)
 
      | ygjb wrote:
      | https://www.krackattacks.com/
      | 
      | Probably referring to the internet drama related to silent
      | patching and disclosure embargo. There are some details
      | here, and others on various mailing lists, including an
      | airing of differences if you want to look for that sort of
      | thing after making a bowl of popcorn.
 
| SCHiM wrote:
| """ How can the adversary construct unencrypted Wi-Fi frames so
| they are accepted by a vulnerable device? First, certain Wi-Fi
| devices accept any unencrypted frame even when connected to a
| protected Wi-Fi network. """
| 
| This actually made me angry. How fucking long are we doing this
| already? This is so. basic. Why is this possible? This should
| incur liability, we know the IT environment is adversarial.
| 
| I understand one can make technical mistakes, or shoot oneself in
| the foot in low level languages that are difficult to handle
| correctly. But this is a conceptual mistake, involving crypto!
| How can you possibly have written this code for an issue like
| this to occur? What is the control flow that leads to this? I
| almost cannot imagine how someone could code this up by accident,
| this must be a backdoor. Just imagine:                 if
| decrypt(encrypted) == false       {         memcpy(plaintext,
| encrypted); // lets try to use the encrypted data anyway, you
| never know!       }       handle_packet(plaintext);
 
  | Reventlov wrote:
  | WiFi has always been developed on being retro-compatible. The
  | good side is you can use something from 2003 with AP from today
  | (let's ditch the 5MHz and 10MHz bandwidth), the downside is you
  | have a big stack of technical debt in most of the chipset out
  | there, which might be why this kind of things happens.
  | 
  | Not having any access to the firmware source (thanks FCC) does
  | not help at all.
 
    | thereddaikon wrote:
    | Why is it the FCC's fault specifically? The FCC doesn't
    | regulate Intellectual Property. They regulate radios. Are you
    | implying its within the FCC's power to say radio firmware
    | must be open source?
 
      | the8472 wrote:
      | They require that users can't use restricted frequency
      | ranges or raise the power level. The easiest and cheapest
      | way for manufacturers to comply is to lock down firmwares.
      | And since they didn't _also_ require open firmwares that 's
      | the effective outcome in many cases.
 
  | avidiax wrote:
  | Even with encryption turned on, there will be plaintext packets
  | you must process (e.g. to start the session). So it requires a
  | whitelist to properly enforce, but all your conformance tests
  | will pass without it. Easy to miss.
 
| riobard wrote:
| By now it's probably easier in mind to treat any Wi-Fi as Open
| Network and always use something like WireGuard/Tailscale for
| secure communication between devices.
 
  | doggodaddo78 wrote:
  | Yeap. I'm trying to remember if 802.11x would help or it's just
  | AAA. Point-to-point tunnels up one layer are the way to go.
 
  | DanAtC wrote:
  | If only we knew 6 months earlier after a _reasonable_
  | disclosure.
 
    | fmajid wrote:
    | It's always been my working assumption that WiFi security
    | should be presumed to be broken until it is proven to be
    | broken.
 
| Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote:
| The chained CVE's made for interesting reading. Book-marked for
| future reference when I have my SDR to hand.
 
| DanAtC wrote:
| A 9 month embargo is disgusting. Linux users have been sitting
| ducks while others may or may not received silent updates.
 
  | _Nat_ wrote:
  | I appreciate the distaste for a security-vulnerability being
  | sat on for so long. However, the appropriateness of a long-
  | embargo would seem like a bigger topic.
  | 
  | That said, about being sitting ducks.. dunno how much the
  | situation really changes like that. For example, was this
  | really unknown before this particular discovery? And what other
  | vulnerabilities aren't currently being reported, whether under
  | embargo or not?
  | 
  | Seems like users ought to have reasonable expectations about
  | how secure popularly practiced technology is. If someone
  | believed that a vulnerability like this wasn't a possibility,
  | then they may need to update their expectations.
 
  | haukem wrote:
  | Often many companies and organizations from many countries are
  | getting informed about such security problems under the
  | embargo. I assume that the intelligence agencies form many
  | countries are also getting these information. Either they are
  | officially informed, because they also protect the government
  | networks or they have just good working relationships with
  | their local companies.
  | 
  | I assume Microsoft would inform the NSA about such things,
  | Huawei would inform the Chinese intelligence agencies and
  | Siemens would inform the German BND.
 
    | DanAtC wrote:
    | And those nations got a chance to freely exploit it* for way
    | longer than a typical reasonable disclosure of 90 days.
    | 
    | *Assuming they didn't already know about it which is why fast
    | disclosure is so important.
 
    | Dah00n wrote:
    | I can't read from your comment if you think this is A Good
    | Thing. In my opinion it is s Very Bad Thing. None of those
    | entities are more important than everyone else. If anyone
    | should be alerted it should only be those that fix the
    | vulnerability in WiFi devices. Anyone else and not only does
    | the risk of leaks rise exponentially but some of them will
    | rub their fingers with glee and exploit it ASAP.
 
      | haukem wrote:
      | I think such long embargoes are bad.
      | 
      | Embargoes prevent that the average cyber criminal knows
      | about the problems, but the resourceful organizations
      | already get the information before the public knows about
      | them. I think even 90 days are pretty long.
      | 
      | For example 253 vendors were informed about the problem in
      | dnsmasq about 3 months before it was published:
      | https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/434904 (all vendors listed
      | here were informed) In each organization probably multiple
      | people know about this.
 
| lwhi wrote:
| I just checked for an update for my TP Link Rouer, nothing yet.
| 
| How likely are large manufacturers likely to react to this?
 
  | jeroenhd wrote:
  | From my experience with TP-LINK software, you don't need to
  | worry about this attack. The attack demonstrated is complex,
  | requires physical proximity and a lot of knowledge about the
  | target.
  | 
  | Meanwhile, your router will probably give any attacker root if
  | they ask it nicely. TP-Link doesn't seem to care about device
  | security at all if you're already paid for the device, so don't
  | expect any updates and expect a whole range of vulnerabilities
  | to be exploitable against your router.
  | 
  | Now, it must be said, TP-Link is no D-Link, a company that
  | almost seems to add security problems to their software
  | intentionally with their awful software quality, but if you're
  | conscious about security, any consumer device will probably
  | have a whole bunch of exploits that would work easier and more
  | reliably.
  | 
  | EDIT: replaced the word "access" with "proximity" to avoid
  | confusion.
 
    | darkarmani wrote:
    | > requires physical access
    | 
    | What? You just need a high enough gain antenna and you can
    | carry it out much further away than it appears your wifi
    | reaches. Isn't physical access, being able to touch the
    | computer?
 
      | jeroenhd wrote:
      | I suppose I used the term wrong, but you do need to be
      | within receiving range _and_ depending on the attack you
      | need to win a race condition, so it 's not that far from
      | the generally accepted use of "physical access".
      | 
      | Meanwhile, many consumer routers can be hacked by adding
      | something similar to  to a page or
      | malicious ad. I don't think general consumers should be
      | worried about someone aiming a high gain antenna at your
      | router unless you work at a company dealing with sensitive
      | information or places like embassies. The alternatives are
      | much easier and much cheaper to execute.
 
  | Dah00n wrote:
  | If the device didn't first appear on the market in the last six
  | months? About as likely as Apple opening their hardware.
 
  | beermonster wrote:
  | Well you may find you can run (but May understandably not want
  | to) OpenWRT on your TP Link Router. And OpenWRT released an
  | update following KRACK
 
  | crookshanked wrote:
  | From my own experience with TP Link routers I don't expect them
  | to update at all.
 
| inetknght wrote:
| > _certain devices accept plaintext aggregated frames that look
| like handshake messages. An adversary can exploit this by sending
| an aggregated frame whose starts resembles a handshake message
| and whose second subframe contains the packet that the adversary
| wants to inject._
| 
| That reminds me of a thread [0] that came up a month ago
| mentioning discussion of packets in packets [1]. That paper was
| from 2011!
| 
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26778236
| 
| [1]:
| https://static.usenix.org/events/woot11/tech/final_files/Goo...
 
| mdeck_ wrote:
| "Frag" as a portmanteau of FRagmentation and AGgregation is
| hardly a non-ambiguous choice of terminology.
 
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Suprised there is nothing in the "Q&A" that refers to wired
| devices. As if there is no choice.
 
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Fragmentation is usually disabled in home APs. I've played with
| it on hostapd, but didn't find a performance improvement, and
| investigating withe WireShark found even 64k packets were not
| being fragmented. Is the same true for enterprise AP?
 
  | Dah00n wrote:
  | It's enabled with WiFi6 so a forward compatible vulnerability!
 
| pmlnr wrote:
| > By default devices don't send fragmented frames. This means
| that the mixed key attack and the fragment cache attack, on their
| own, will be hard to exploit in practice, unless Wi-Fi 6 is used.
| When using Wi-Fi 6, which is based on the 802.11ax standard, a
| device may dynamically fragment frames to fill up available
| airtime.
| 
| Why does this feel like Spectre? We're trying to speed things up
| in a way that eventually blows back into our face.
 
  | dylan604 wrote:
  | Does it have anything to do with the speed of
  | development->deployment? If something that is going to be
  | standardized is rushed, then these kind of easily-ish found
  | flaws will continually haunt us. If things slowed down and
  | allowed a serious amount of pentesting before standarization,
  | then maybe we can avoid these herpes like flaws where they sit
  | dormant and then flare up, but can never be eliminated once
  | discovered.
 
    | lupire wrote:
    | Doubtful.
    | 
    | > several of the newly discovered design flaws have been part
    | of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997!
    | 
    | And spectre is also based on a decades old documented flaw.
    | 
    | It's just not very practical to predict every feasible attack
    | until a lot of people have real systems to explore.
 
  | high_byte wrote:
  | why do you need complex systems at all? just use a flat memory
  | system with no kernel. no stack cookies. in fact, no internet
  | is probably better.
 
| miles wrote:
| From the industry response[1]:
| 
| > "It's important to note that there is presently no evidence of
| the vulnerabilities being used against Wi-Fi users maliciously
| and these issues are mitigated through routine device updates
| once updated firmware becomes available.
| 
| > "Like many previous vulnerabilities, FragAttacks has been
| academically well-researched and responsibly reported in a manner
| allowing the industry to proactively prepare and begin to roll
| out updates that fully eliminate the vulnerabilities. This set of
| vulnerabilities requires a potential attacker to be physically
| within range of the Wi-Fi network (or user device) in order to
| exploit it. This significantly reduces the likelihood of actual
| exploitation or attack."
| 
| [1] https://www.commscope.com/blog/2021/wi-fi-alliance-
| discloses...
 
  | lupire wrote:
  | How would a victim know if someone in a coffeeshop used this
  | attack?
  | 
  | > these issues are mitigated through routine device updates
  | once updated firmware becomes available.
  | 
  | Unless you are one of the millions upon millions of people who
  | have an Android device that launched >3 years ago.
 
  | tomaskafka wrote:
  | > This set of vulnerabilities requires a potential attacker to
  | be physically within range of the Wi-Fi network
  | 
  | I have troubles imagining an attack on wifi protocol where this
  | doesn't apply :).
 
    | the8472 wrote:
    | Back in the day you could disconnect some modems by sending
    | certain strings over any higher level protocol, e.g. ICMP or
    | IRC.
 
      | segfaultbuserr wrote:
      | I think this vulnerability is one of the most embarrassing
      | blunders caused by a software patent.
 
      | doggodaddo78 wrote:
      | Back in the day, you could:
      | 
      | - Hijack TCP sessions very easily with IP hijacking,
      | especially telnet
      | 
      | - DoS someone with a smurf attack
      | 
      | - Ping of death windoze
      | 
      | - Inject content into unencrypted pages (goatse everyone's
      | web page backgrounds)
      | 
      | - Get hacked by running inetd services
      | 
      | - chargen ... nuf said
      | 
      | - Apply a zillion patches to a Solaris box but break 10
      | other things
 
  | darkarmani wrote:
  | > requires a potential attacker to be physically within range
  | of the Wi-Fi network (or user device) in order to exploit it.
  | 
  | So everyone that lives or works in a city? That can't be many
  | people can it?
 
  | asclepi wrote:
  | I agree with the industry response here. KRACK was the same
  | thing. The author finds a vulnerability that is _absolutely
  | valid_ (no denying here), easy to exploit in a lab but very
  | hard to exploit in practice. Back in the day, we did test our
  | equipment for KRACK. We concluded that someone had to
  | circumvent all our physical security barriers (challenging, but
  | theoretically possible) to get close enough to an AP that would
  | see sensitive stuff, had to know WHEN to do that, or at least
  | plant a device that could easily be noticed, and they would
  | still fail because we didn 't have 802.11r enabled on those
  | AP's.
  | 
  | Is it a concern? It depends on what you're doing. It is
  | absolutely a concern if your corporation is handling ultra-
  | sensitive information. However, you should also question your
  | physical barriers in that case and whether you should use Wi-Fi
  | at all for some aspects of your operation. Is it a concern for
  | the vast majority of office workers or someone at home?
  | Probably not; there would be easier ways to find a valid credit
  | card number that don't involve the time and effort for a hacker
  | to travel to your place where they could be discovered. There's
  | no need to replace all your AP's with new hardware, although
  | the Wi-Fi Alliance would love for you to do that.
  | 
  | Does this exploit warrant its own fancy name and domain name?
  | As was the case for KRACK, I don't believe so. That should be
  | reserved for vulnerabilities that have a severe impact AND are
  | extremely trivial to exploit with no proximity requirements. If
  | not, the fancy-name-vulns risk being deprived of their ability
  | to get the attention that is required.
 
    | gipsies wrote:
    | Several of the implementation flaws allow an attacker to
    | essentially inject plaintext frames in a Wi-Fi network. All
    | that's needed is being within range of the network (with an
    | extender you can still be far away). I agree that the design
    | flaws aren't that serious! But that's also explicitly
    | mentioned on the website so...
    | 
    | Edit: injection can be used to punch a hole in the router's
    | NAT so someone can directly try to attack your devices. As
    | always there world isn't burning down. But I think it's
    | interesting research :)
 
      | asclepi wrote:
      | I agree, it absolutely is interesting research, and I
      | appreciate the detailed explanation that was published.
      | 
      | Although the proximity requirement severely limits the
      | possible impact, it does make us think again about the
      | security of our Wi-Fi networks, and as a result we may
      | identify areas to improve, which is a benefit.
 
    | Dah00n wrote:
    | >[KRACK] easy to exploit in a lab but very hard to exploit in
    | practice
    | 
    | How so? Even I have done it (on my own AP). Unless you own a
    | big property that the WiFi signal cannot reach outside it's
    | as easy as pressing GO in one of the hundreds of script
    | kiddie tools.
 
    | noja wrote:
    | > I agree with the industry response here.
    | 
    | I don't. This sentence serves no purpose other than
    | distraction and needs to stop being used: "there is presently
    | no evidence of the vulnerabilities being used".
    | 
    | It's a standard sentence that is rolled out for any security
    | event or breach usually to misdirect blame. It needs to go
    | away.
 
      | zwp wrote:
      | I disagree: for defenders trying to establish veracity of
      | flaws and prioritizing defense this is useful information.
      | "Active exploits seen in wild" is a strong signal.
      | 
      | Picking two potentially high impact announcements from the
      | last month or so:
      | 
      | 1. There is a severe flaw in the RSA cryptosystem. 2. There
      | is a remote code exec vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange.
      | 
      | One of these was a sketch of an incremental improvement to
      | an attack that remains mostly of theoretical interest. The
      | other was being actively exploited, was tragically simple
      | for 3rd parties to replicate post-announcement and resulted
      | in widespread pain.
      | 
      | There is some (non-linear) scale here (theoretical
      | flaw/poc/weaponized poc/public poc/public weaponized
      | poc/exploited, but limited actors or targets/widely
      | exploited/HAVOC). MS for example uses just "less likely to
      | be exploited", "more likely to be exploited" "being
      | exploited". It's coarse and somewhat subjective but there
      | is value even so.
      | 
      | "This flaw is being actively exploited in the wild" is the
      | best line I can take upstairs. I don't want to see that go
      | away just because some parties might misuse it.
 
| risedotmoe wrote:
| I've always felt an always listening radio, especially the ones
| in televisions that try to connect to anything it can, in any
| device is a big gaping security hole. We've already seen how
| Bluetooth makes things vulnerable. If you're truly worried about
| security, go with the cable.
 
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