Wi-Fi Gets More Secure: What You Need to Know About WPA3
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Things I know about WPA3:
- None of my routers support it, and I'm not gonna buy all new routers.
- My printer doesn't support it. Heck, it doesn't support WPA2.
- None of my IOT doohickies support it. Not gonna buy all new devices.
In this instance, I feel I'm more aligned with Joe Lunchbucket than Zap McTechburg. I still use my PSP. It's 14-years-old and not going to work with WPA3. My wireless printer is 15-years-old, and doesn't even do 5GHz.
By the time the average person upgrades all their gear to WPA3 stuff, it'll be cracked and we'll be on WPA5.
The WPA3 functionality is already added to hostapd and wpa_supplicant [1]. Look for the terms SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals), DPP (Device Provisioning Protocol) and OWE (Opportunistic Wireless Encryption).
The current experimental wpa_supplicant Debian package has this enabled [2]. I think the main challenge is upgrading clients, especially when vendors no longer provide updates.
[1] https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/log/?qt=grep&q=SAE
[2] https://packages.qa.debian.org/w/wpa/news/20180722T152029Z.h...
Nobody is claiming you'll be on WPA3 tomorrow, just that it's here, and that you'll eventually migrate to it unless you never buy anything new again...
In 2018, off the top of my head I can get to 30 devices connected on WiFi at my house. VERY much a different discussion than 2004.
We're adding more and more connected devices:
Phones, tablets, desktops, laptops all typically have a short life..
Smart home devices with WiFi, well, those claim an incredible life - but I really pity anyone putting today's consumer "IoT" devices in. Those things are often out of support before you even buy them. I doubt they are lasting 10 years, and even when I do, I doubt they'll still be safe to leave in place.
TVs and TV set top boxes - this one really bugs me. I want a good quality dumb panel, because the smarts are out of date well within two years, and the TV itself should be good for way longer. TV Boxes, they go out of date too - but there cheap, so get replaced way more often.
Long story short - I think the devices we're buying today are not designed to stand the test of time. They will IMO die out or be removed from your home much faster than we all hope.
Edit addition: also, forgot to mention - I had lots of stuff that was WEP only. Much of it well after WPA2 came out. There all long gone, I expect the same will happen to the vast majority of people.
If you had to keep the door to your house unlocked for 5-10 years would you still consider it relatively short? How about if you couldn't patch your OS for the same length of time?
Being stuck with such vulnerabilities for years is only short if nothing that tech touches is of much value to you.
Such as? You had to go out of your way to find devices that both had wifi and were only WEP capable in the early 2000s.
Same song and dance as USB 1.1, USB 3, USB C, Lightning Cables (relative to iPod dock connectors), and all of our evolving standards. It sucks for a year or two and we move on.
For the purposes of WPA transitions, I’m willing to bet slick dual hand routers will support WPA2/3 split between each channel.
I turn off whatever insecure protocols exist on my router and will do the same once everything I care about can do WPA3. Getting the population at large to do the same is difficult. I’ll evangelize the benefits of switching, but the best way to loose support is to break use cases by pushing people onto something that prevents their positive device experiences.
Awesome! Point me in the direction of the firmware upgrade portal for my 15-year-old wifi printers, computers, and game machines from companies that no longer exist.
I'm not really sure how to interpret your 'Awesome!'. If it was meant snarky and if you're willing to, please have a look at the HN guidelines for comments [1]. We can then improve the quality of the discussion.
You're right. I'm sorry about that. Sometimes I forget which web site I'm posting on.
Actually, thinking a bit longer about the problem, the issue in my mind is that vendors/producers do not have an incentive to update software if you only pay for the hardware once. For them it's just a cost. It's more interesting to sell more hardware. My strategy as consumer is to go to open source for such devices. But perhaps there are better strategies.
I'm aware of Cisco having a model to pay for software updates, but this is mainly for business clients. Does anyone know other vendors that have business models, that create incentives for updating devices? Perhaps even for consumers?
I remember that in the past MacOS updates had to be purchased, but this no longer seems to be the case. Is there actually a consumer market for such business models, where hardware and (paid) software are tied together for a longer life cycle?
Well, some people with OS/2, Atari STs, and VAX mainframes are not gonna get extended WiFi security either.
Those that have newer stuff and can afford to switch to new printers and everything after 10 or 15 years, can use it tho, and those would still be tons of users (and more going forward). We moved from old wifi standards anyway (or you don't use WAP2 either?).
For most people it's just their laptops and phones (which they change every few years), printer (which is easily replaceable since the ink replacements they have to do regularly cost more than the main unit (or close) anyway), and maybe some TV or media player unit.
If it doesn't make you worry, there's nothing to do here. WPA3 gives you nothing.
I guess if WPA2 get blown apart (to the degree WEP was) there might be a market for super-low-power APs that you put on or right next to the device. Not sure that'd be enough without additional shielding.
Most WPA2 devices do support 802.1x which —depending on the crack— may help extend the lifetime.
Then, for certain networked things, such as printers, maybe we can hang a Pi-like device off of one of their physical interfaces and have a WPA3 connection, if we so desire and are willing to go through the contortions?
- I can install/upgrade some packages on my OpenWrt router/computers to enable it.
- I can leave a WPA2 SSID for my old gadgets.
> By the time the average person upgrades all their gear to WPA3 stuff, it'll be cracked and we'll be on WPA5.
Perhaps vendors can implement a WPA3/WPA2 mixed mode? Or just use the dual SSID hack...
This isn't advanced, it's pretty common.
It would be great if it actually was common, and such features came pre-configured out of the box for users. Unfortunately, most of the routers I'm aware of that are given to users from ISPs don't even support guest modes.
I don't think there's an easy fix for this and I'm not criticizing WPA3 or anything. Ideally we could just update/throw out old, incompatible devices, but realistically I know that's not going to happen. I'm just pointing out that the suggestion to "keep WPA2 enabled for your old, WPA3-incompatible devices" kinda misses the point about WPA3 in the first place.
If you're vulnerable to compromised coffee shop or home networks already, you're likely to also be vulnerable tomorrow. The only change is a slight increment in the standard. And the worst companies are not going to be saved by any change in the standard.
I guess I don't really see the point of this entire subthread.
There's a false implication here that "keeping WPA2 enabled yesterday" isn't a problem. But it is. There are flaws in WPA2, and fixing those flaws is the entire point of developing WPA3. Security is supposed to get better as time goes on (hackers are certainly getting better whether your security is or not). But security isn't getting better if you just keep using the old standards.
Would you feel comfortable enabling WEP on all your company's routers with the justification "well we're not any more vulnerable today with WEP than we were in 1998 with WEP"?
>I guess I don't really see the point of this entire subthread.
I don't either.
For ordinary users, setting a strong passphrase is all they need to do to have network with improved security, even in the mixed mode.
In addition, you can isolate the WPA2 SSID away (for all those printers, Internet of Trash, some old smartphones that are never going to receive security updates, etc) from the rest of the network, and use strong, and independent passphrases for each network, the compromise of WPA2 would not affect WPA3 to a large extent.
Then what's the point of even developing WPA3? Why not revise WPA2 to just require really long passwords?
And then you have to buy a new garage to put it in, because the old garage was too small
And you have to digitize all your CD's because it only has a phone connection
Except you have to replace your phone, too, because it's too old for Android Auto (or the iPhone equivalent)
It's the ripple-on effect of having to migrate all the devices that vendors don't bother to "fix"
CarPlay. The more you know…
I do think we’re going to see more mixed networking with modern access points supporting multiple networks so you can have your primary devices stay secure while the botnets controlling your IoT fridge and TV duke it out on a different SSID.
I'm pretty sure that the wifi devices I own that were EOL'ed a decade ago aren't going to get a software upgrade. Nor are the ones from companies that are no longer in business.
For most people, I’m expecting primary devices (phones, laptops) to get updates along with newer routers (at least the higher end ones).
The big question is how common the practice of segregating old devices will be since it’s still easy to find things which don’t even do 5GHz and that includes a majority of TVs, Android devices, etc.
printer is 15-years-old
Of all my printers in the past 20 years none has lived from more than three years. I had the cheap ones as well as the more expensive ones with 3 years warranty.
Note to self: buy laser printer not inkjet.
I think we are moving into the future where ISP provides the router to you, or basically a Unit that combines Modem / ONT / Wireless Router into one. So you will (hopefully) get upgraded every 5 - 8 years.
The reason Open WiFi never had encryption is essentially because people argued that if a connection cannot be perfectly secure then it shouldn't try to be secure at all. Or the exact opposite of defense in depth.
Enhanced Open does what we should have been doing since WPA1, Opportunistic Wireless Encryption. It is imperfect, but a substantial improvement over current Open WiFI.
To quote Voltaire "Perfect is the enemy of good."
That's a branding issue: we've been selling "https://" as secure, so we can't go back now and reeducate users. We should have decoupled the idea of security from the protocol used (https can be insecure) and used a separate channel entirely to communicate security, e.g. what browsers are doing now with padlocks or colour schemes. But it's too late to change the SSL UX.
> It prevents the use of a strong password hash (such as bcrypt) when storing passwords (since either the password, or the digested username, realm and password must be recoverable) [1]
Much better to have bcrypt'ed passwords stored on the server and your private SSL keys. If your compromised, revoke the SSL keys, and force users to change their passwords. With strong bcrypt'ed passwords, you can be reasonably sure passwords can't be recovered, but best to enforce resets anyways. With digested passwords, those will be recovered and end up in Troy Hunt's Pwned Passwords database.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_access_authentication...
I know the CA system isn't perfect, but with the certificate transparency efforts it's pretty good. It would give me a trust point for the network I'm connecting to.
Opportunistic encryption without authentication is a major step up, and probably good enough for this scenario.
Having said that, there's no need for a CA as such to make that work.
Probably, SSIDs would need to be globally unique, or somehow couples with a GPS coordinate..
I guess manufacturers could even issues certificates for globally unique SSIDs by allowing costumers to register a sub-domain with them. my-net.my-router.com
Yeah, dealing with CAs is probably overkill for local coffee shops and home networks.
People act like there is 0 harm in prematurely releasing a security feature in a network standard not remembering the various network hardware that will be made based on this don't follow a software development lifecycle where you just publish sprint 2 a few weeks from now with improvements and the world moves on. Even when things get updated wireless clients that are easily updatable (e.g. iOS/Windows devices) are only just recently using TLS 1.2 in their PEAP sessions. We shouldn't be playing fast and lose with security implementation in a future standard just because it sounds nice at first glance and assume sounds nice is better than nothing. What if we decide the next iteration of this design is to rely on PKI to create a chain of trust and now we've created 5 years of shit not working because wireless implementations are so shotty? Similar things have happened with other wireless standard revisions already... hell 802.11ac spent a lot of time and planning on MIMO (which is well established in other radio specifications already) and we still got an entire generation of wireless hardware that worked better without it enabled due to lack of real world vetting.
The best hope in this case is everyone realizes this doesn't provide any meaningful security in the current revision even though it's already available and being pranced around as a great security benefit.
/Rant of a network standards guy
But—correct me if I'm wrong—it does help in the case where you have a home wifi network, that your devices all connect to, and remember the network. It will encrypt all the traffic of your devices. An attacker can't create a different network with the same SSID and trick existing devices to connect to it, right?
If I'm right, then this is quite valuable. It means that most home users can have an encrypted LAN without having to remember the password and tell all their guests what it is whenever they have a visitor.
Can't he? Wouldn't the existing devices just try to connect to whatever broadcasts that SSID.
0: https://emaknyus.blogspot.com/2011/07/airpwn-bringing-goatse... (warning, likely contains goatse - image did not load for me)
https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03554....
Looks like no one was supporting this algorithm and it still got adopted for wpa3. What can we do about this? Are vendors this corrupt?
For everyone else's benefit:
* The "new" PAKE in WPA3 is Dragonfly.
* Dragonfly was designed by Dan Harkins, not Kevin Igoe.
* Dan Harkins does not work for NSA.
* Dragonfly isn't backdoored; it just sucks.
* The "NSA" drama around Dragonfly is that Igoe co-chaired CFRG, the IETF crypto review board, when Dragonfly was introduced, and encouraged its advancement.
(Old) HN thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6942145
Vendors aren't corrupt. Standards bodies are, intrinsically. Harkins lobbied hard to get Dragonfly added to IETF protocols and didn't get anywhere, because Trevor Perrin freaked out about it (good for him!). IEEE standards bodies don't have a Trevor Perrin right now, so all sorts of wacky shit will be standardized. But don't let IETF people be smug about that: the IETF's process admits a whole different class of wacky shit, and has its own terrible track record.
I think in the end either I disagree radically or I can't parse this the way you intended. Can you maybe clarify? One thing in particular, "standards bodies" is a very broad term, which encompasses everything from industry consortia like W3C through government agencies like NIST and whatever the IETF is. Are these all "intrinsically corrupt"? How so?
The millions and billions from the NSA's black budget[0] have to end up somewhere after all...
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black...
The ability to have multiple PSKs and revoking\changing one of them but not the others would be really convenient for small and even medium-sized wifi deployments...
Density and security are less of a concern on LTE, and the peak throughput is catching up.
The question I have has always been: are we seeing a world moving towards a more controlled wireless network architecture or a evolved version of Wi-Fi type of ad-hoc architecture.
Whether device look for carrier in unlicensed spectrum: the answer is yes, Licensed Assisted Access is happening, though slowly, as with any things related to carrier. See this link: https://support.t-mobile.com/thread/144981
Finally, it's certainly not something you can only do with SDR, but then doing it with SDR could be what makes it appealing though, it the price can be somewhat brought down. Good Wi-Fi routers nowadays cost a lot anyways, and some even wants you to pay monthly fee, no?
As for devices on the other end, apparently it is possible to skimp out and have 1x1 instead of 2x2 https://superuser.com/a/323778 I don't even know why 1x1 is an option at this point. Don't make me think! In any case, mobile SoC manufacturers should incorporate this new technology much faster so I would assume the new WiFi will be readily available in mobile hardware not more than three years after the standard is final.
Technically less power as well but I doubt anyone who cares that much about power is using 802.11.
Same applies to WiFi in the coffee shops (do you remember the time when FB didn’t use HTTPS?) and other places. Thus the WPA3 upgrade brings much smaller benefits compared to WPA2 upgrade.
Dns? Wins? Bonjour ?
> and all the sensitive resources (documents file server, for example) are protected with authentication.
But are the files streamed in plaintext? (samba, nfs3, nfs4 without encryption)?
Does WPA3 maintain this protection, or is it now open to quantum attacks?
Also, is there a mode to allow connecting to open networks with authentication based on TLS certificates and domain names? For example, the SSID of the network could be a domain name, and the network would present a certificate for that domain (or some well-defined subdomain) to prove that it's indeed that network. This way, if you know the domain of the entity you're connecting to (e.g. a hotel), and see a WiFi with that name (and have a client that doesn't allow unicode for this mode), you could connect securely.
Or maybe all that is needed is a feature-stuffed version of dhcp that would configure a default gateway and a secure l3 tunnel to that default gateway as well as on-demand tunnel establishment parameters for intra-vlan endpoints. This would secure wired and non-wifi wireless IP networks as well.
Compare:
Everything You Need to Know About WPA3
WPA3
- "Everything You Need to Know About the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", by Albert Einstein
- "Everything You Need to Know About My Early Life", by Winston Churchill
- "Everything You Need to Know About Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", by J. K. Rowling
It's a common phrase in ending.
I'd rather move towards a world where you don't need a password to access a WiFi network and people share their internet access freely. This would improve not only access to the internet, but also increase privacy because you wouldn't be able to rely on an IP address indicating someone's identity.
Every time some headline tell me a "need" something, I keep going. Obvious clickbait.
And insulting. You don't know what I "need."
Yes, there are additional modes "WPA3 Personal Transitional" and "WPA3 Enterprise Transitional" which allow WPA2 on the same SSID and relax some of the WPA3 requirements like PMF.
I mean, yeah? How's that different from every other time there's a new standard?
It took several years for people to pitch their old dell laptops and nintendo consoles that couldn't support the then-new standards. People aren't going to replace their thermostats, baby-monitors, security systems, home entertainment systems, and juicers over night.