Description
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.<br/> 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.
Next sessions
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Dissecting CRAFT, a full-round attack
Speaker : Eran Lambooij - Inria
I will present the first full-round key recovery attack on CRAFT, a block cipher introduced at ToSC 2019. The attack builds on the previous observation (ToSC 2026) that the state of CRAFT can be decomposed into two parts that barely exchange information. We transform this property into a dissection attack on the full-round cipher. This shows that in some cases we can elevate the dissection attack[…]-
Cryptography
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Key Attack on the ACDGV Matrix Encryption Scheme
Speaker : Anmoal Porwal - Technical University of Munich
I will present our key-recovery attack on the ACDGV public-key encryption scheme proposed at ASIACRYPT 2024 by Aragon, Couvreur, Dyseryn, Gaborit, and Vinçotte. The secret key is a Gabidulin code hidden by appending random rows and columns and by left- and right-multiplication with invertible matrices. Our attack exploits the resulting algebraic structure to recover an equivalent secret key. It[…]-
Cryptography
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Asymmetric primitive
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Module Learning With Errors and Structured Extrapolated Dihedral Cosets
Speaker : Jinwei Zheng - Télécom Paris
The Module Learning With Errors (MLWE) problem is the fundamental hardness assumption underlying the key encapsulation and signature schemes ML-KEM and ML-DSA, which have been selected by NIST for post-quantum cryptography standardization. Understanding its quantum hardness is crucial for assessing the security of these standardized schemes. Inspired by the equivalence between LWE and[…]-
Cryptography
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