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Attacking WPA3: New Vulnerabilities and Exploit Framework

Date

August 25, 2022

Time

10:30

Track

Main Track

In this presentation, we perform an audit of WPA3’s new features. We focus on Management Frame Protection, which prevents the popular deauthentication attack, and we study the new Simultaneous Authentication of Equals handshake. This uncovered several 0-day vulnerabilities, ranging from attacks that allow an adversary to trivially disconnect users from the network, to remotely crashing an access point, and revealed a vulnerability that allows an adversary to intercept all traffic of a victim under the right circumstances. Proof-of-concepts are implemented using a new Wi-Fi testing framework, allowing researchers to easily test their devices for several of the identified vulnerabilities.

The layout of the presentation is as follows:

  • The new Simultaneous Authentication of Equals handshake, also called Dragonfly, which prevents dictionary attacks and provides forward secrecy.
  • The mandatory usage of Management Frame Protection which most notably prevents ‘deauthentication attacks’ where a client is forcibly disconnected from the network.
  • The introduction of the SAE Public Key protocol to better secure “coffee shop” hotspots where authenticated is based on a shared password.
  • I’ll also briefly mention known weaknesses in WPA3, namely the Dragonblood attacks, and how they relate to the work being presented. Summarized, the Dragonblood attacks covered side-channel leaks in the SAE (Dragonfly) handshake that enabled an adversary to still perform dictionary attacks.

After this introduction, the presentation will focus on the security of Management Frame Protection (MFP). This feature most notably prevents certain denial-of-service attacks. For instance, it prevents the famous deauthentication attack. However, we discovered various novel DoS attacks that remain possible even when WPA3 and MFP are being used. For instance, we will explain the following newly discovered attacks:

  • An adversary can trivially disconnect Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and Windows clients, by spoofing beacon frames that contain a channel switch announcement. Beacon frames are not protected, even when using MFP, meaning an adversary can trivially perform this attack by spoofing beacon frames.
  • Against Linux and Windows, we also demonstrate that spoofing beacon frames that announce an unsupported channel bandwidth causes the client to disconnect from the network, even when MFP is being used.
  • The presentation will also briefly mention design flaws in MFP that still enable an adversary to perform attacks when the victim is in the process of connecting to the network.
  • Last but not least, we will demonstrate how initiating a large number of SAE handshakes causes the D-Link DIR-X1860 router to crash. We conjecture that this vulnerability affects many more vendors and devices.
  • We will mention that these attacks were implemented in our new Wi-Fi testing framework. This enables others to easily test their own devices against these attacks. This framework also allows other researchers to easily implement other Wi-Fi attacks.

We will also cover attacks agains the novel SAE-PK protocol. In particular, two network-based attacks will be discussed:

  • An adversary can use techniques such as ARP poisoning to still intercept the traffic of all clients in the network. This can be prevented by disabling client-to-client communication.
  • Second, because the group key used to encrypt broadcast and multicast frames is shared by all clients in the network, this key can be used by any client to spoof broadcast and multicast traffic. Moreover, we will demonstrate that an adversary can even use the group key to spoof unicast traffic against several victims.
  • Finally, the presentation will briefly mention the possibility of constructing rainbow tables to still break the SAE-PK password. In other words, rainbow tables can be used to convert the SAE-PK password into a known public and private key, which then enables the adversary to create a rogue clone of the network (but this is a theoretic attack and hence only briefly mentioned in passing – it’s still good for the audience to know that it exists).

Speakers

Researcher

National University Singapore

Dr. Wang Kailong is currently a research fellow at National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his PhD degree from School of Computing NUS in 2022. He has worked as a Research Assistant in NUS while pursuing his PhD degree from 2016 to 2021. His research interests include mobile and web security and privacy, and protocol verification. His works have appeared in the top conferences such as WWW and MobiCom.

Co-Founder & CTO

Authomize

Mr. Gal Diskin is a cybersecurity and AI researcher. He was previously the VP & head of Palo Alto Networks’ Israeli site, and is a serial entrepreneur. Mr. Diskin’s research has been featured in HITB, Defcon, Black Hat, CCC, and other conferences, spanning fields from low level security research such as hardware vulnerabilities, binary instrumentation, and car hacking to high level research on AI detection methods, Enterprise security, and Identity security. Mr. Diskin was also the technical lead and co-founder of Intel’s software security organization, as well as the CTO of Cyvera and HeXponent (co-founder) before their acquisition.

Senior Security Researcher

Huajiang โ€œKevin2600โ€ Chen (Twitter: @kevin2600) is a senior security researcher. He mainly focuses on vulnerability research in wireless and Vehicle security. He is a winner of GeekPwn 2020 and also made to the Tesla hall of fame 2021. Kevin2600 has spoken at various conferences including KCON; DEFCON and CANSECWEST.

Security Researcher

Li Siwei is a security researcher. He specializes in Big data analysis and AI Security.

Founder, CEO

CloudSEK

Rahul Sasi is an Indian entrepreneur, Founder of CloudSEK, and a security expert. He was voted as the top influential Cyber Security person in 2015, he has made a significant open source contribution to the security landscape and is an invited speaker to over 20+ countries. He is part of the working committees of RBI and MeitY.
CloudSEK : https://cloudsek.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fb1h2s/

Senior Security Engineer

CloudSEK

Vishal Singh is working as a Senior Security Engineer at CloudSEK. His main responsibility includes handling the Research & Development of CloudSEK ASM. He loves automating manual effort tasks, and also likes net surfing & exploring new places in his free time.

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