Mitigating the KRACK in WPA2 with WIPS

On Monday, security researcher Mathy Vanhoef disclosed a new vulnerability in the WPA/WPA2 four-way handshake, which has been branded KRACK. The attack is targeted and sophisticated, and it results in decrypting a TKIP or CCMP/AES encrypted session without knowledge of the PTK. WPA/WPA2-Personal and WPA/WPA2-Enterprise networks are vulnerable.

The attack takes advantage of client side implementations of the WPA/WPA2 protocol, which in some cases allows clients to reinstall the PTK and reuse cryptographic information in a way that allows the the attacker to decrypt the session. The PSK or 802.1X credentials are not compromised by this attack. I know that description is vague so if you want more, my favorite resource on this is this serious of videos from Hemant Chaska of Mojo Networks. Do yourself a favor and watch them all.

The ultimate solution to the vulnerability is to patch clients to prevent them from reusing the same cryptographic information when EAPOL keys are retransmitted. That will take some time, and there are a lot of clients, like IoT clients, which are unlikely to ever be patched. Windows and iOS clients with the latest security patches are already protected.

Fortunately, the attack relies on the attacker deploying an easy to detect and mitigate rogue AP. Today, without patching clients or the WLAN infrastructure, KRACK can be totally mitigated on a WLAN by configuring WIPS to auto-contain rogue AP’s that broadcast one of your own SSID’s. You need to tread lightly and understand the legal consequences before enabling auto-containment of rogue AP’s (Configure it for alerting-only first!). It’s best to get management and your InfoSec teams involved before taking this step so that the benefits and risks of auto-containment are understood by the organization.

Another solution is to disable retransmission of EAPOL frame M3 on the WLAN, but sometimes M3 needs to be retransmitted. If there was a collision or the frame arrived to quickly for the client to process, it should be retransmitted to complete the four-way handshake and prevent the client from going through a full reassociation. This is especially true for latency-sensitive voice clients which roam frequently, resulting in many four-way handshakes. These clients may be short on CPU cycles and free memory to quickly process EAPOL frames, and may require an occassional EAPOL frame retransmission.

Therefore, I prefer to mitigate KRACK by using WIPS to contain rogues that use the organization’s own SSID’s. As you can see from the test below, a Cisco monitor-mode AP will deauth a new client on a rogue AP before any data frames are transmitted.

Even simple probing on the channel resulted in a flood of deauth/disassociate frames from the monitor-mode AP to the client:

This attack works by setting up the rogue AP on a different channel from the target AP, so make sure you are scanning all channels for rogues. It’s also a good idea to setup notifications from your NMS in the event that a rogue is contained so that you are aware of potential attacks as well as false positives that require correction.

The one exception to WIPS protection appears to be CVE-2017-13082, which will require an infrastructure-side patch. This only affects SSID’s that use 802.11r.

So patch your clients, tune your WIPS, and relax! The sky is not falling.