Vulnerabilities in billions of Wi-Fi devices let hackers bypass firewalls

Vulnerabilities in billions of Wi-Fi devices let hackers bypass firewalls

Enlarge (credit: Mathy Vanhoef)

FragAttacks, short for fragmentation and aggregation attacks, because they all involve frame fragmentation or frame aggregation. Broadly speaking, they allow people within radio range to inject frames of their choice into networks protected by WPA-based encryption.

Bad news

Assessing the impact of the vulnerabilities isn’t straightforward. FragAttacks allow data to be injected into Wi-Fi traffic, but they don’t make it possible to exfiate anything out. That means FragAttacks can’t be used to read passwords or other sensitive information the way a previous Wi-Fi attack of Vanhoef, called Krack, did. But it turns out that the vulnerabilities—some that have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997—can be exploited to inflict other kinds of damage, particularly if paired with other types of hacks.

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