Network security researchers have published details of a new vulnerability that arises from a “design flaw” in the IEEE 802.11 WiFi standard (CVE-2023-52424), which is said to impact “all operating systems and WiFi clients” and allows an attacker to trick Wi-Fi clients into connecting to an untrusted network.
According to TOP10VPN, which teamed up with security researcher Mathy Vanhoef to share this WiFi exploit – ahead of its presentation at the WiSec ’24 conference in Seoul – the root cause of this vulnerability stems from the fact that the IEEE 802.11 standard underpinning how WiFi works does not require the network name (SSID) to always be authenticated.
In short, the attack tricks a victim into connecting to a different WiFi network than the one they intended by exploiting the lack of SSID authentication. As if to make matters worse, routers that support the latest WPA3 encryption standard may be more vulnerable than those using WPA1 or WPA2. This is because WPA3 has an optional mode where the SSID is not used to derive the Pairwise Master Key (PMK) in the SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) handshake.
Unfortunately, while avoiding the use of the SSID is what makes this mode highly robust against a variety of cyberattacks, it is also what makes it vulnerable to the new attack outlined in the new report. But when WPA3 incorporates the network’s SSID, the new attack will fail. Mesh WiFi networks typically also use SAE rather than 802.11X to avoid introducing a single point of failure, which means they may also be vulnerable.
How Does the Attack Work?
For the SSID Confusion attack to succeed, the following must be true:
➤ The victim wants to connect to a trusted network.
➤ There is a second network available with the same authentication credentials as the first.
➤ The attacker is within range to perform a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack between the victim and the trusted network.
Note that the victim doesn’t need to have ever connected to the untrusted network. Nor does the attacker need to know the victim’s credentials.
Once the target (victim) has connected to a different WiFi network from the one they intended, the attacker – who controls the bad network – can then do all sorts of nasty things, such as installing malware on the client’s device or snooping on their internet traffic. Full details can be found in this report (PDF).
A successful SSID Confusion attack also causes any VPN with the functionality to auto-disable on trusted networks to turn itself off, leaving the victim’s traffic even more exposed.
Report Conclusion
We showed that users, or their apps, make security-sensitive decisions based on the network they are connected to. For instance, some VPNs can disable themselves when connected to a trusted Wi-Fi network. However, we demonstrated that a client can be tricked into unknowingly connecting to a different network, even when enterprise or home WPA3 protection is used. This is caused by a design flaw in several authentication methods defined in the 802.11 standard. This vulnerability was assigned CVE-2023-52424.
A backwards-compatible defence is to use beacon protection and to verify the authenticity of a beacon, and the network name contained in it, before exchanging data frames. Alternatively, the 802.11 standard can be updated to always authenticate the network name when connecting to a network.
The big problem here is that, in order to properly resolve this, the existing WiFi standard(s) might need some updates, which is something that may only occur for kit that is still supported by the manufacturer.
In the meantime, existing networks can mitigate the attack by avoiding credential reuse across SSIDs, while enterprise networks should use distinct RADIUS server CommonNames and home networks should use a unique password per SSID (i.e. not one password shared across all the SSIDs put out by your router, which is fairly common).