Mathy Vanhoef

We introduce key reinstallation attacks (KRACKs). These attacks abuse features of a protocol to reinstall an already in-use key, thereby resetting nonces and/or replay counters associated to this key. We show that our novel attack technique breaks several handshakes that are used in a WPA2-protected network.

All protected Wi-Fi networks use the 4-way handshake to generate fresh session keys. The design of this handshake was proven secure, and over its 14-year lifetime no weaknesses have been found in it. However, contrary to this history, we show that the 4-way handshake is vulnerable to key reinstallation attacks. In such an attack, the adversary tricks a victim into reinstalling an already in-use key. This is achieved by manipulating and replaying handshake messages. When the victim reinstalls the key, the associated incremental nonce and replay counter is reset to its initial value. Apart from breaking the 4-way handshake, we also show that our key reinstallation attack breaks the group key and Fast BSS Transition (FT) handshake. The impact of our attacks depend on both the handshake being targeted, and the data-confidentiality protocol in use. Simplified, against AES-CCMP, an adversary can replay and decrypt packets, but cannot forge packets. Still, this makes it possible to hijack TCP streams and inject malicious data into them. Against WPA-TKIP and GCMP, the impact is catastrophic: an adversary can replay, decrypt, and forge arbitrary packets. Rather surprisingly, GCMP is especially affected because it uses the same authentication key in both communication directions. Finally, we confirmed our findings in practice, and found that every Wi-Fi device is vulnerable to some variant of our attacks. Notably, our attack is exceptionally devastating against Android and Linux: it forces the client into using a predictable all-zero encryption key.

We analyze the generation and management of WPA2 group keys. These keys protect broadcast and multicast Wi-Fi traffic. We discovered several issues and illustrate their importance by decrypting all group (and unicast) traffic of a typical Wi-Fi network.

First we show that the 802.11 random number generator is flawed by design, and provides an insufficient amount of entropy. This is confirmed by predicting randomly generated group keys on several platforms. We then examine whether group keys are securely transmitted to clients. Here we discover a downgrade attack that forces usage of RC4 to encrypt the group key when transmitted in the 4-way handshake. The per-message RC4 key is the concatenation of a public 16-byte initialization vector with a secret 16-byte key, and the first 256 keystream bytes are dropped. We study this peculiar usage of RC4, and find that capturing 2 billion handshakes can be sufficient to recover (i.e., decrypt) a 128-bit group key. We also examine whether group traffic is properly isolated from unicast traffic. We find that this is not the case, and show that the group key can be used to inject and decrypt unicast traffic. Finally, we propose and study a new random number generator tailored for 802.11 platforms.