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Comment by jcalvinowens

1 day ago

> Essentially everyone with the SSID on multiple access point MAC addresses can get pwned

You still have to be able to authenticate to some network: the spoofing only allows users who can access one network to MITM others, it doesn't allow somebody with no access to do anything.

In practice a lot of businesses have a guest network with a public password, so they're vulnerable. But very few home users do that.

I run a website, video game servers, and Nextcloud. I have the nextcloud set to only allow access from my IP. It has to be open to the world with a domain name so I can use LetsEncrypt certs so it cannot only use private ip addresses which cannot be easily configured and trusted for https.

I have been relying on EAP TLS via wifi so my phones could upload their photos and videos to Nextcloud.It was way cheaper than doing it via AWS, which is what I used to do and used ethernet LAN connections only. If this works asynchronously across time to allow authentication to my network which uses EAP TLS, will knock me out of being able to use Nexctloud on my mobile devices since plugging an ethernet in after I take photos is too cumbersome to do very often.

I love Nextcloud, but do not want to pay Amazon for EC2 etc.

My read is this allows them to mimic both client and access point to assemble the handshake and obtain radius authentication. Rather than have to verify a certificate on the client or crack complex passwords, they pretend to the client sending the response it sends when the certificate is verified. Then they switch MAC to the SSID MAC and send the next part to the client. Previous evil twin attacks were one sided rather than basic frame assemblers.

I read that paper as describing a successful reconstruction of the Radius authentication handshakes at layer 2 after the fact for use later rather than caring about actual certificate validations. Basically handing a three letter agency quality tool to the Kali Linux fan club.

I am hoping I read it wrong,

  • > I have the nextcloud set to only allow access from my IP. It has to be open to the world with a domain name so I can use LetsEncrypt certs so it cannot only use private ip addresses which cannot be easily configured and trusted for https.

    I would put that nextcloud instance on a private/vpn IP and not expose it. For the letsencrypt you can use DNS based approval. Cloudflare DNS is pretty easy to configure for example, they also support setting DNS records for private IPs which I understand is not standard. (If it's on a private IP you don't strictly need HTTPS anyway). Wireguard is ideal for this kind of thing and it works well on mobile as well.

    If the above quoted piece is the entirety of your requirements there are a lot of other ways to solve the same issue. Tunnels, reverse proxies etc.

    EDIT: Letsencrypt just recently add a new authentication method which uses a one time TXT entry into your DNS record.

  • I admittedly don't have practical experience with RADIUS, but I read it as a more narrow attack:

    > We verified that an attacker, having intercepted the first RADIUS packet sent from the enterprise AP, can brute-force the Message Authenticator and learn the AP passphrase.

    I thought RADIUS fundamentally negotiates based on a PSK between the AP and the RADIUS box, which the attacker doesn't have? They're saying this gives you the ability to brute force that PSK, but if the PSK isn't weak (e.g. a dictionary word) that's hopeless.

    • > I thought RADIUS fundamentally negotiates based on a PSK between the AP and the RADIUS box, which the attacker doesn't have?

      Are you talking about the secret shared between the NAS and the RADIUS server? It's only used to scramble some attributes (like MS-MPPE-Send-Key), but not all of them. Message-Authenticator is one that's not scrambled. Looking at this FreeRADIUS dictionary file I have, I see 42 out of ~6000 attributes that are scrambled.

      Anyway, yeah, if you have a bigass shared secret, it's going to be infeasible to guess. I'm pretty sure that the long-standing very, very strong suggestion for operators has been something like "If you don't co-locate your RADIUS server and your NAS, then you really need have a bigass shared secret, and probably want to be using something like IPSec to secure the connection between the two." [0][1]

      [0] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3579#section-4.3.3>

      [1] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3579#section-4.2>

It is common for ISPs to issue network equipment that enable a guest network by default. I wonder if those are vulnerable.