A set of vulnerabilities in how Wi-Fi is designed and used in practice expose virtually every Wi-Fi-enabled device to some form of attack. A handful of those flaws have been around since the original Wi-Fi standard debuted in 1997.
The findings, publicly disclosed this week by New York University Abu Dhabi researcher Mathy Vanhoef, show that an attacker within Wi-Fi range of a target network could potentially exfiltrate data from a victim and compromise their devices. But while the sheer scale and scope of the exposure is staggering, many of the attacks would be difficult to carry out in practice, and not all Wi-Fi devices are affected by all of the flaws.
Vanhoef collectively calls the findings “Frag Attack,” short for "fragmentation and aggregation attacks," because the flaws largely relate to subtle issues in how Wi-Fi chops up and reorders data in transit to move information as quickly as possible, then puts that data back together on the other end.
“The fragmentation functionality is normally used to improve the performance of your Wi-Fi network if there’s a lot of background noise,” Vanhoef says. The goal is to split data up into more manageable fragments for transmission that can be efficiently reassembled when they're received. But Vanhoef discovered security weaknesses in the process. “You can cause a receiver to reassemble two fragments that belong to different packets or even store malicious data and combine it with legitimate information,” he says. "Under the right conditions this can be used to exfiltrate data.”
Vanhoef also found a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to in ..
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