Dragonblood: Analysing Vulnerabilities in WPA3’s Dragonfly Handshake

“Currently, all modern Wi-Fi networks use WPA2 to protect transmitted data. However, because WPA2 is more than 14 years old, the Wi-Fi Alliance recently announced the new and more secure WPA3 protocol. One of the main advantages of WPA3 is that, thanks to its underlying Dragonfly handshake, it’s near impossible to crack the password of a network. Unfortunately… an attacker within range of a victim can still recover the password of the network. This allows the adversary to steal sensitive information such as credit cards, password, emails, and so on, when the victim uses no extra layer of protection such as HTTPS.

“The Dragonfly handshake, which forms the core of WPA3, is also used on certain Wi-Fi networks that require a username and password for access control. That is, Dragonfly is also used in the EAP-pwd protocol. Unfortunately, our attacks against WPA3 also work against EAP-pwd, meaning an adversary can even recover a user’s password when EAP-pwd is used. We also discovered serious bugs in most products that implement EAP-pwd. These allow an adversary to impersonate any user, and thereby access the Wi-Fi network, without knowing the user’s password. Although we believe that EAP-pwd is used fairly infrequently, this still poses serious risks for many users, and illustrates the risks of incorrectly implementing Dragonfly.”

Download the full report at

Click to access dragonblood.pdf

Source: Dragonblood: Analysing WPA3’s Dragonfly Handshake

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