Release the Kraken: New KRACKs in the 802.11 Standard
Mathy Vanhoef, Frank Piessens
Abstract
We improve key reinstallation attacks (KRACKs) against 802.11 by generalizing known attacks, systematically analyzing all handshakes, bypassing 802.11's official countermeasure, auditing (flawed) patches, and enhancing attacks using implementation-specific bugs. Last year it was shown that several handshakes in the 802.11 standard were vulnerable to key reinstallation attacks. These attacks manipulate handshake messages to reinstall an already-in-use key, leading to both nonce reuse and replay attacks. We extend this work in several directions. First, we generalize attacks against the 4-way handshake so they no longer rely on hard-to-win race conditions, and we employ a more practical method to obtain the required man-in-the-middle (MitM) position. Second, we systematically investigate the 802.11 standard for key reinstallation vulnerabilities, and show that the Fast Initial Link Setup (FILS) and Tunneled directlink setup PeerKey (TPK) handshakes are also vulnerable to key reinstallations. These handshakes increase roaming speed, and enable direct connectivity between clients, respectively. Third, we abuse Wireless Network Management (WNM) power-save features to trigger reinstallations of the group key. Moreover, we bypass (and improve) the official countermeasure of 802.11. In particular, group key reinstallations were still possible by combining EAPOL-Key and WNM-Sleep frames. We also found implementation-specific flaws that facilitate key reinstallations. For example, some devices reuse the ANonce and SNonce in the 4-way handshake, accept replayed message 4's, or improperly install the group key. We conclude that preventing key reinstallations is harder than expected, and believe that (formally) modeling 802.11 would help to better secure both implementations and the standard itself. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Security protocols; Mobile and wireless security; • Networks → Security protocols;
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Install the CLIlune papers fulltext 20a0dbee-517e-49a5-9789-1e5e2eb9748dCited by top-tier papers15
- Dragonblood: Analyzing the Dragonfly Handshake of WPA3 and EAP-pwdMathy Vanhoef, Eyal RonenS&P 2020 · 146 citations
- Fragment and Forge: Breaking Wi-Fi Through Frame Aggregation and FragmentationMathy VanhoefUSENIX Security 2021 · 48 citations
- M2MON: Building an MMIO-based Security Reference Monitor for Unmanned VehiclesArslan Khan, Hyungsub Kim, Byoungyoung Lee, Dongyan Xu et al.USENIX Security 2021 · 35 citations
- DY Fuzzing: Formal Dolev-Yao Models Meet Cryptographic Protocol Fuzz TestingMax Ammann, Lucca Hirschi, Steve KremerS&P 2024 · 25 citations
- All your Credentials are Belong to Us: On Insecure WPA2-Enterprise ConfigurationsMan Hong Hue, Joyanta Debnath, Kin Man Leung, Li Li et al.CCS 2021 · 14 citations
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