Comment by pmlnr
4 years ago
> By default devices don't send fragmented frames. This means that the mixed key attack and the fragment cache attack, on their own, will be hard to exploit in practice, unless Wi-Fi 6 is used. When using Wi-Fi 6, which is based on the 802.11ax standard, a device may dynamically fragment frames to fill up available airtime.
Why does this feel like Spectre? We're trying to speed things up in a way that eventually blows back into our face.
Does it have anything to do with the speed of development->deployment? If something that is going to be standardized is rushed, then these kind of easily-ish found flaws will continually haunt us. If things slowed down and allowed a serious amount of pentesting before standarization, then maybe we can avoid these herpes like flaws where they sit dormant and then flare up, but can never be eliminated once discovered.
Doubtful.
> several of the newly discovered design flaws have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997!
And spectre is also based on a decades old documented flaw.
It's just not very practical to predict every feasible attack until a lot of people have real systems to explore.
why do you need complex systems at all? just use a flat memory system with no kernel. no stack cookies. in fact, no internet is probably better.
seriously, have we learned nothing from Battlestar Galactica?