New Wi-Fi Encryption Vulnerability Affects Over A Billion Devices

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new high-severity hardware vulnerability residing in the widely-used Wi-Fi chips manufactured by Broadcom and Cypress—apparently powering over a billion devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, routers, and IoT gadgets.

Dubbed ‘Kr00k‘ and tracked as CVE-2019-15126, the flaw could let nearby remote attackers intercept and decrypt some wireless network packets transmitted over-the-air by a vulnerable device.

The attacker does not need to be connected to the victim’s wireless network and the flaw works against vulnerable devices using WPA2-Personal or WPA2-Enterprise protocols, with AES-CCMP encryption, to protect their network traffic.

“Our tests confirmed some client devices by Amazon (Echo, Kindle), Apple (iPhone, iPad, MacBook), Google (Nexus), Samsung (Galaxy), Raspberry (Pi 3), Xiaomi (RedMi), as well as some access points by Asus and Huawei, were vulnerable to Kr00k,” ESET researchers said.

According to the researchers, the Kr00k flaw is somewhat related to the KRACK attack, a technique that makes it easier for attackers to hack Wi-Fi passwords protected using a widely-used WPA2 network protocol.

First, Learn What Kr00k…