Billions of devices—many of them already patched—are affected by a Wi-Fi vulnerability that allows nearby attackers to decrypt sensitive data sent over the air, researchers said on Wednesday at the RSA security conference.
[...]Eset researchers wrote in a research paper published on Wednesday. "The attack surface is greatly increased, since an adversary can decrypt data that was transmitted by a vulnerable access point to a specific client (which may or may not be vulnerable itself)."
[...]Kr00k exploits a weakness that occurs when wireless devices disassociate from a wireless access point. If either the end-user device or the access point is vulnerable, it will put any unsent data frames into a transmit buffer and then send them over the air. Rather than encrypt this data with the session key negotiated earlier and used during the normal connection, vulnerable devices use a key consisting of all zeros, a move that makes decryption trivial.
[...]Eset researchers determined that a variety of devices are vulnerable, including:
- Amazon Echo 2nd gen
- Amazon Kindle 8th gen
- Apple iPad mini 2
- Apple iPhone 6, 6S, 8, XR
- Apple MacBook Air Retina 13-inch 2018
- Google Nexus 5
- Google Nexus 6
- Google Nexus 6S
- Raspberry Pi 3
- Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-I9505
- Samsung Galaxy S8
- Xiaomi Redmi 3S
The researchers also found that the following wireless routers are vulnerable:
- Asus RT-N12
- Huawei B612S-25d
- Huawei EchoLife HG8245H
- Huawei E5577Cs-321
An Apple spokesman said the vulnerabilities were patched last October with details for macOS here and for iOS and iPadOS here.
[...]While the vulnerability is interesting and users should make sure their devices are patched quickly—if they aren't already—there are a few things that minimize the real-world threat posed.
[...]Despite the limited threat posed, readers should ensure their devices have received updates issued by the manufacturers. This advice is most important for users of vulnerable Wi-Fi routers, since routers are often hard to patch and because vulnerable routers leave communications open to interception even when client devices are unaffected or are already patched.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Friday February 28 2020, @05:35AM
The subhead on TFA reads:
Hmmm...Let's see if the rest of TFA can narrow things down a bit:
Relevantly:
A check of the above mentioned CVE [nist.gov] details affected firmware/software configurations and is rated a low (3.1) severity vulnerability.
When posting articles on vulnerabilities, it's probably a good idea to put the CVE ID in TFS.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr