Man-in-the-Middle Attacks without Rogue AP: When WPAs Meet ICMP Redirects

Modern Wi-Fi networks are commonly protected by the security mechanisms, e.g., WPA, WPA2 or WPA3, and thus it is difficult for an attacker (a malicious supplicant) to hijack the traffic of other supplicants as a man-in-the-middle (MITM). In traditional Evil Twins attacks, attackers may deploy a bogus wireless access point (AP) to hijack the victim supplicants’ traffic (e.g., stealing credentials). In this paper, we uncover a new MITM attack that can evade the security mechanisms in Wi-Fi networks by spoofing the legitimate AP to send a forged ICMP redirect message to a victim supplicant and thus allow attackers to stealthily hijack the traffic from the victim supplicant without deploying any bogus AP. The core idea is to misuse the vulnerability of cross-layer interactions between WPAs and ICMP protocols, totally evading the link layer security mechanisms enforced by WPAs. We resolve two requirements to successfully launch our attack. First, when the attacker spoofs the legitimate AP to craft an ICMP redirect message, the legitimate AP cannot recognize and filter out those forged ICMP redirect messages. We uncover a new vulnerability (CVE-2022-25667) of the Network Processing Units (NPUs) in AP routers that restrict the AP routers from blocking fake ICMP error messages passing through the router. We test 55 popular wireless routers from 10 well-known AP vendors, and none of these routers can block the forged ICMP redirect messages due to this vulnerability. Second, we develop a new method to ensure the forged ICMP redirect message can evade the legitimacy check of the victim supplicant and then poison its routing table. We conduct an extensive measurement study on 122 real-world Wi-Fi networks, covering all prevalent Wi-Fi security modes. The experimental results show that 109 out of the 122 (89%) evaluated Wi-Fi networks are vulnerable to our attack. Besides notifying the vulnerability to the NPU manufacturers and the AP vendors, we develop two countermeasures to throttle the identified attack.