Researcher finds vulnerability in WPS protocol, looks for manufacturers to present fix

At the plus side, your router’s mostly secure. Security researcher Stefan Viehbock has just discovered a chief security hole which allowed him to exploit a brute force method to access a WPS PIN-protected network in about two hours. In step with Viehbock, a design flaw allows the WPS protocol’s 8-digit PIN security to fall dramatically as additional attempts are made. With each attempt, the router will send a message stating whether the 1st four digits are correct while the last digit of the hot button is used as a checksum after which given out by the router in negotiation. Accordingly, the 100,000,000 possibilities that the WPS should represent becomes roughly to 11,000.

The US-CERT has picked up in this and advised users to disable WPS on their routers. Viehbock, in turn, claims to have attempted to debate the vulnerability with hardware vendors similar to Buffalo, D-Link, Linksys, and Netgear, but says he have been roundly ignored and that no public acknowledgement of the difficulty was released. As a probable final step, Viehbock has promised to release a brute force tool soon, thereby pushing the manufacturers to work to solve the problem. In other news, that evil supercomputer from the movie War Games just got just a few more digits of the nuclear launch codes — maybe considered one of Stefan’s pals can look at that one.

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This post is tagged: brute force tool, hardware vendors, public acknowledgement, security hole, supercomputer