Monitoring

Monitoring

Despite the difficulty of decoding a 2.4GHz digital signal, hardware to listen to 802.11 transmissions is readily available to attackers in the form of consumer 802.11 products. The products possess all the necessary monitoring capabilities, and all that remains for attackers is to convince it to work for them.

Although most 802.11 equipment is designed to disregard encrypted content for which it does not have the key, we have been able to successfully intercept WEP-encrypted transmissions by changing the configuration of the drivers. We were able to confuse the firmware enough that the ciphertext (encrypted form) of unrecognized packets was returned to us for further examination and analysis.

Active attacks (those requiring transmission, not just monitoring) appear to be more difficult, yet not impossible. Many 802.11 products come with programmable firmware, which can be reverse-engineered and modified to provide the ability to inject traffic to attackers. Granted, such reverse-engineering is a significant time investment (we have not done this ourselves), but it's important to note that it's a one time cost. A competent group of people can invest this effort and then distribute the rogue firmware through underground circles, or sell it to parties interested in corporate espionage. The latter is a highly profitable business, so the time investment is easily recovered.