Security researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens of KU Leuven University have been credited with finding the crucial flaws in the Wi-Fi standard itself and not specific products.
Dubbed “Key Reinstallation Attacks†and “Krack Attacksâ€, they let attackers eavesdrop on all traffic over public and private Wi-Fi networks, even those protected with the WPA2 encryption.
In response to these obviously dangerous exploits, The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued the following warning:
US-CERT has become aware of several key management vulnerabilities in the 4-way handshake of the Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) security protocol. The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection and others.
Note that as protocol-level issues, most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected. The CERT/CC and the reporting researcher KU Leuven, will be publicly disclosing these vulnerabilities on 16 October 2017.
An attacker would make a carbon copy of a WPA2-protected Wi-Fi network, impersonate the MAC address and change the Wi-Fi channel. Taking advantage of a flaw in the handshake method, a device can be forced to bypass the original network and connect to the rogue one.
While Wi-Fi passwords or secret keys cannot be obtained using this method, hackers can still eavesdrop on traffic and, in some cases, force a connection to bypass HTTPS in order to expose usernames, passwords and other critical data.
