Krack Attack – Wi-Fi Vulnerability Affecting WPA

WEP has been considered to be a flawed encryption and Wi-Fi implementations have always concentrated on implementing WPA Encryption standard so as to ensure a secure Wi-Fi communication channel. However, recently researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens, from the University of Leuven, have found multiple flaws in WPA encryption which would allow hackers to decode the traffic and inject malicious packets into the secure WPA communications channel.

The vulnerabilities in itself are related to the WPA protocol standard which allows the attackers to force the devices to reissue the nonce effectively forcing the devices to initiate Key Reissue Attacks (KRACK).

This weakness in the protocol allows the attackers to sniff the traffic traversing between the devices and access-points while the worst case scenario is injection of malware into websites. The vulnerability affects all devices running on Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Linux. Due to the devastating implications of this vulnerability, Vendors have been quick to respond and made available patches to mitigate these vulnerabilities.

Identifiers:

More can be read about this research over here https://www.krackattacks.com/

Microsoft:

Ubuntu:

Redhat:

Intel:

Advisory: