A number of potential side channel (Cache and Timing) attacks were discovered in the SAE implementations used by both hostapd (AP) and wpa_supplicant (infrastructure BSS station/mesh station). SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) is also known as WPA3-Personal. The discovered side channel attacks may be able to leak information about the used password based on observable timing differences and cache access patterns. This might result in full password recovery when combined with an offline dictionary attack and if the password is not strong enough to protect against dictionary attacks. References: https://w1.fi/security/2019-1/sae-side-channel-attacks.txt https://wpa3.mathyvanhoef.com/ Upsteam Patch: https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=d42c477cc794163a3757956bbffca5cea000923c https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=c93461c1d98f52681717a088776ab32fd97872b0 https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=c93461c1d98f52681717a088776ab32fd97872b0 https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=6513db3e96c43c2e36805cf5ead349765d18eaf7 https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=362704dda04507e7ebb8035122e83d9f0ae7c320 https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=90839597cc4016b33f00055b12d59174c62770a3 https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=f8f20717f87eff1f025f48ed585c7684debacf72 https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=cff138b0747fa39765cbc641b66cfa5d7f1735d1
Created hostapd tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: epel-all [bug 1699145] Affects: fedora-all [bug 1699144] Created wpa_supplicant tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1699143]
Setting Attack Complexity (AC) to High because an attacker needs the password to be weak for the dictionary attack to succeed, which is not under the attacker control. An attacker who is able to recover the password of a network could use it to impact the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of the transmission (CIA:H).
Statement: This issue did not affect the versions of wpa_supplicant as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 as they did not include support for SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals). This issue did not affect the versions of wpa_supplicant as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 as they are not compiled with SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) enabled. In particular, the CONFIG_SAE=y option is not set at compile time.
Acknowledgments: Name: Mathy Vanhoef (NYUAD), Eyal Ronen (Tel Aviv University & KU Leuven)
External References: https://w1.fi/security/2019-1/sae-side-channel-attacks.txt https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/871675/
hostapd-2.7-2.fc28 has been pushed to the Fedora 28 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
hostapd-2.7-2.fc29 has been pushed to the Fedora 29 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.