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I do think it's an end-of-the-world type vulnerability, at least as far as Wi-Fi goes. 1) The paper claims confidentiality compromise allows the attacker to hijack a tcp connection: "allow an adversary to decrypt a TCP packet, learn the sequence number, and hijack the TCP stream to inject arbitrary data", this on all cases, even in the cases where it doesn't allow forgery (CCMP) 2) There's no such claim on the paper and according to the researcher, exploiting this on Android and Linux is trivial. Apparently also macOS. Did you see the video on their website? 3) There's no way for you to control this (apps, https stripping, for instance). Most importantly, there's no way for the average user to control this, short than using a VPN. Again, as far as Wi-Fi security goes, seems pretty end-of-the-world to me. I don't think the huge attention this is getting is unwarranted. |
The attack is a standard break exiting secure TCP connection and trick the target to re-create it to a host controlled by the attacker via arp poisoning or route hijacking. After that either convince target to accept a bogus cert or redirect to insecure connection. In the former case the issue is that browsers have way too many root CAs included in them and those CAs can issue certs for any domain; the issue in the second case is that users are not being paranoid enough.