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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @08:06PM (5 children)
Sniffing enough wifi packets that you could get the login credentials. I thought this was well known over 10 years ago.
(Score: 2) by NickM on Friday February 28 2020, @09:33PM (4 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by NickM on Friday February 28 2020, @09:39PM (2 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 29 2020, @03:47AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NickM on Sunday March 01 2020, @04:17PM
At home, I concede that this is not that scary but in a corporate settings this technique gives an attacker the potential to harvest a lots of juicy credentials since almost the all the suits use laptops, they are assuredly wirelessly connected when they are in a meeting room and since they are suits they are almost always in a meeting of some sorts.
News like this, makes me glad that I don't work in the IT security administrative unit .
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Friday February 28 2020, @11:37PM
pwnagotchi
google it.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."