The IT Nerd

If you have a router that uses Wi-Fi Protected Setup or WPS, then there’s a good chance that it is insecure. Some research that I came across shows that wireless routers are still quite vulnerable to attack if they don’t use a good implementation of Wi-Fi Protected Setup. Bad implementations do a poor job of randomizing the key used to authenticate hardware PINs. Because of this, the new attack only requires a single guess at the hardware PIN to collect data necessary to break it. After a few hours to process the data, an attacker can access the router’s WPS functionality. Now here’s what makes this really bad:

The Wi-Fi Alliance could not confirm whether the products impacted by the attack were certified, according to spokeswoman Carol Carrubba.

“A vendor implementation that improperly generates random numbers is more susceptible to attack, and it appears as though this is the case with at least two devices,” she said in a statement. “It is likely that the issue lies in the specific vendor implementations rather than the technology itself. As the published research does not identify specific products, we do not know whether any Wi-Fi certified devices are affected, and we are unable to confirm the findings.”

That means that your router might be affected. Or it might not be affected. There’s no way to be sure at the moment. My take? As a matter of course I disable WPS for any customer and I explain why. It is a far to easy way for someone to get access to your network. Thus if you want your network to be secure, you need to keep this feature disabled.

In the meantime, I wonder how many router companies are going to be shipping firmware updates to address this. Assuming that they admit to it at all.

This entry was posted on August 31, 2014 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Security, WiFi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.