10/16/2017

Update Every Device

This KRACK hack kills your Wi-Fi privacy

It's time to get patching again. Another widespread vulnerability affecting practically everyone and everything that uses Wi-Fi was revealed on Monday, allowing hackers to decrypt and look at everything people are doing online.

Researcher Mathy Vanhoef, from Belgian university KU Leuven, released information on his hack, dubbing it KRACK, for Key Reinstallation Attack. Vanhoef's description of the bug on his KRACK website is startling: "This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos, and so on. The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks. Depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data. For example, an attacker might be able to inject ransomware or other malware into websites."

What's behind the vulnerability? It affects a core encryption protocol, Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2), relied on by most Wi-Fi users to keep their web use hidden and secret from others. More specifically, the KRACK attack sees a hacker trick a victim into reinstalling an already-in-use key. Every key should be unique and not re-usable, but a flaw in WPA2 means a hacker can tweak and replay the "handshakes" carried out between Wi-Fi routers and devices connecting to them; during those handshakes, encryption keys made up of algorithmically-generated, one-time-use random numbers are created. It turns out that in WPA2, it's possible for an attacker to manipulate the handshakes so that the keys can be reused and messages silently intercepted.

Please click here to read the complete article on Forbes.