Wi-Fi Security Issues: WPA2 Protocol Faced With Severe Risk, Making Devices Vulnerable to Hacking, Decryption
Security analysts recently found a severe risk that targets the Wi-Fi Protected Access II protocol, more commonly known as WPA2, making a lot of devices vulnerable to hacking activities.
WPA2 is a common security protocol used in Wi-Fi networks in houses and workplaces.
The security vulnerability was first revealed through a website called Krack Attacks, which was put up by security analyst Mathy Vanhoef. The WPA2 exploit is now being referred to as KRACK or Key Reinstallation Attacks, according to the website.
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For the KRACK to work, Vanhoef explained that the attacker will only need to trick a victim's device into "reinstalling an already-in-use key," which explains the exploit's name. This was done by controlling what the security analyst called "cryptographic handshake messages."
Vanhoef added that the recently found exploit can bypass even the 4-way handshake security measure that most WPA2 connection also use.
The 4-way handshake is responsible for determining whether a connection user or a device and its access point have the correct credentials such as Wi-Fi passwords. It also automatically seeks for a new encryption key to protect all network traffic experienced in a certain Wi-Fi connection.
The security researcher added that KRACK can be utilized by "an attacker within range of a victim." Once a hacker gains access to the exploit, the Wi-Fi network's protection can be easily decrypted, thus there is a high chance that every device connected to it will be compromised.
"This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos, and so on. The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks," Vanhoef further explained on KrackAttacks.com.
Currently, Vanhoef's research found that KRACK variants can penetrate a wide array of devices such as Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, OpenBSD, MediaTek, Linksys and more. The analyst emphasized that a code in devices running on Android 6.0 or higher makes it vulnerable.
With all these risks in mind, every user connected to a WPA2 Wi-Fi network was highly encouraged to immediately install updates for their devices as soon as they become available.
