5 Minutes on the WPA2 KRACK Vulnerability
The WPA2 KRACK vulnerability can be boiled down to one main aspect – forced nonce-reuse resulting in an attacker's ability to decrypt messages and 'manipulate' data through man-in-the-middle attacks on Wi-Fi access points. How Wi-Fi Works WPA2 is the general protocol adopted for Wi-Fi networks where a four-way handshake is used to identify and establish a connection between the supplicant (the user connecting to Wi-Fi) and the authenticator (the Wi-Fi access point they are connecting to). This four-way handshake is encrypted using (AES)-CCMP . When a user tries to connect to a Wi-Fi access point, the 'password' they use to authenticate their access is known as the Pairwise Master Key (PMK). This establishes a symmetric protocol where both the authenticator and the supplicant know the value of the PMK. The communications protocol between the supplicant and the authenticator is as follows in the simplified Fo...