Walden Systems Geeks Corner News Serious Flaw in Wi-Fi Allows Eavesdropping Attacks In Over a Billion Devices Rutherford NJ New Jersey NYC New York City North Bergen County

Serious Flaw in Wi-Fi Allows Eavesdropping Attacks In Over a Billion Devices

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A serious vulnerability in Wi-Fi chips was discovered that affects billions of devices worldwide. It allows hackers to eavesdrop on Wi-Fi communications. The vulnerability comes from the use of an all-zero encryption key in chips made by Broadcom and Cypress, which results in data decryption. This breaks the WPA2-Personal and WPA2-Enterprise security protocols.

The chips are found in smartphones, tablets and laptops that use Broadcom silicon and in IoT gadgets using Cypress chips. This includes several products from Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, Raspberry, and Xiaomi. Researchers at ESET also found the flaw in access points and routers by Asus and Huawei. More than a billion devices are affected.

Researchers are calling the vulnerability KrØØk to incorporate the zeros, and also because it's related to the KRACK vulnerability, The KRACK vulnerability was an industry-wide problem in the WPA and WPA2 protocols for securing Wi-Fi that could cause complete loss of control over data. The Kr00k bug arises from an all-zero encryption key in Wi-Fi chips that reveals communications.

KrØØk shows itself after a disassociation, where a devices disconnects from an access point . Once disassociation occurs, the session key stored in the Wireless Network Interface Controller's Wi-Fi chip is cleared in memory and set to zero since no further data is supposed to be transmitted after the disassociation. However, researchers discovered that all data frames that were left in the chip's transmit buffer were transmitted after being encrypted with this all-zero key. Because it uses all zeros, the data is decrypted and left in plain text.

A hacker can send a series of management frames to trigger the ongoing attack and start collecting data. The attack can be magnified when a vulnerable AP is involved. For example, listening to a smart home hub can retrieve any information sent between it and any connected devices. ESET researchers explained that this then allows hackers to eavesdrop on even unaffected client devices.

Even with conservative estimates this vulnerability can affect over a billion devices because KrØØk is likely not limited to just the devices ESET researchers tested. Qualcomm and MediaTek gear was not vulnerable.