Jul 20, 2021

FragAttacks (fragmentation and aggregation attacks)

FragAttacks is a collection of new security vulnerabilities that affect Wi-Fi devices. This is an adversary that is within range of a victim's Wi-Fi network can abuse these vulnerabilities to steal user information or attack devices. 

Three of the discovered vulnerabilities are design flaws in the Wi-Fi standard and therefore affect most devices. On top of this, several other vulnerabilities were discovered that are caused by widespread programming mistakes in Wi-Fi products. Experiments indicate that every Wi-Fi product is affected by at least one vulnerability and that most products are affected by several vulnerabilities.

The discovered vulnerabilities affect all modern security protocols of Wi-Fi, including the latest WPA3 specification. Even the original security protocol of Wi-Fi, called WEP, is affected. This means that several of the newly discovered design flaws have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997! Fortunately, the design flaws are hard to abuse because doing so will requires user interaction or is only possible when using uncommon network settings. As a result, in practice the biggest concern are the programming mistakes in Wi-Fi products since several of them are trivial to exploit.

Design flaws:

  • CVE-2020-24588: aggregation attack (accepting non-SPP A-MSDU frames)
  • CVE-2020-24587: mixed key attack (reassembling fragments encrypted under different keys)
  • CVE-2020-24586: fragment cache attack (not clearing fragments from memory when (re)connecting to a network)

Implementation vulnerabilities allowing the injection of plaintext frames:

  • CVE-2020-26145: Accepting plaintext broadcast fragments as full frames (in an encrypted network)
  • CVE-2020-26144: Accepting plaintext A-MSDU frames that start with an RFC1042 header with EtherType EAPOL (in an encrypted network)
  • CVE-2020-26140: Accepting plaintext data frames in a protected network
  • CVE-2020-26143: Accepting fragmented plaintext data frames in a protected network

Other implementation flaws:

  • CVE-2020-26139: Forwarding EAPOL frames even though the sender is not yet authenticated (should only affect APs)
  • CVE-2020-26146: Reassembling encrypted fragments with non-consecutive packet numbers
  • CVE-2020-26147: Reassembling mixed encrypted/plaintext fragments
  • CVE-2020-26142: Processing fragmented frames as full frames
  • CVE-2020-26141: Not verifying the TKIP MIC of fragmented frames

Links:

  • https://www.fragattacks.com/
  • https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/farewell-to-firewalls-wi-fi-bugs-open-network-devices-to-remote-hacks/
  • https://github.com/vanhoefm/fragattacks