Practical Side-Channel Attacks against WPA-TKIP

Abstract

We measure the usage of cipher suites in protected Wi-Fi networks, and do this for several distinct geographic areas. Surprisingly, we found that 44.81% of protected networks still support the old WPA-TKIP cipher. Motivated by this, we systematically analyze the security of several implementations of WPA-TKIP, and present novel side-channel attacks against them. The presented attacks bypass existing countermeasures and recover the Michael message authentication key in 1 to 4 minutes. Using this key, an adversary can then decrypt and inject network traffic. In contrast, previous attacks needed 7 to 8 minutes. These results stress the urgent need to stop using WPA-TKIP. CCS CONCEPTS• Networks → Wireless access points, base stations and infrastructure; • Security and privacy → Mobile and wireless security; • Information systems → Data encryption.

Let numbers tell the tale

“…We find that statistics can change significantly based on the surveyed region. For example, in our survey, on average 32.89% of encrypted networks use WPA-TKIP as their group cipher, a deprecated protocol demonstrated to have security vulnerabilities [19,22,27,28]. However, we find notable differences when we inspect each distinct region; for example, in Boston its support rate is 25.82%, in Abu Dhabi 27.17%, in Limburg 45.06%, and in Zürich 34.79%.…”

“…However, we find notable differences when we inspect each distinct region; for example, in Boston its support rate is 25.82%, in Abu Dhabi 27.17%, in Limburg 45.06%, and in Zürich 34.79%. Variations can even be observed within a single city [18,19]. For example, dividing our 2019 Boston survey in the Back Bay and Fenway neighborhoods, we observe they have a WPA-TKIP usage rate of 36.57% and 29.96%, respectively.…”

“…Additionally, we explore the type of wireless networks deployed by analyzing the amendments they support. For example, we observe worrisome trends of an ever-lasting support for vulnerable ciphers such as WPA-TKIP [19]. Despite the efforts to encourage the adoption of new standards, we observe a mere 1.03% support for IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2, 2.22% for IEEE 802.11w (released more than ten years ago) defining Protected Management Frames (PMF), and 1.08% for Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE).…”

“…As a result, researchers resort to performing their own survey in order to contextualize or motivate research projects. For example, surveys were used to show widespread usage of insecure protocols [19] or to understand the adoption rate of security features [14,20,24]. However, the methodologies used to collect and present these datasets vary significantly, leading to inconsistencies affecting the interpretation of their results.…”

A framework to test and fuzz wi-fi devices

“…Over the years, numerous weaknesses and vulnerabilities have been discovered in the wide variety of security and privacy features offered by Wi-Fi. For example, researchers identified key reinstallation attacks [9], security weaknesses in encryption protocols such as WPA-TKIP [5,6] and the Dragonfly handshake of WPA3 [10], and shown stealthy evil-twin attacks against enterprise networks [1]. Furthermore, researchers Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”