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MS: Windows Phone 8 Wi-Fi Vulnerable, Cannot Be Patched
Freshly Exhumed writes "Microsoft advises that a cryptographic problem in the PEAP-MS-CHAPv2 protocol used in Windows Phone 8 to provide WPA2 authentication allows a victim's encrypted domain credentials to be collected by an attacker posing as a typical WiFi access point. Redmond further states that this problem cannot be patched, although a set of manually entered configuration changes involving root certificates on all WP8 phones and on WiFi access points will apparently address the issue. WP7.8 phones are likewise vulnerable."
If it can be fixed through manual configuration changes, why can't a patch make those same configuration changes?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
So that's why all of the wifi pineapples sold out at DEF CON...
Every phone which implements CHAPv2 is vulnerable, because that's a broken algorithm. You can't patch it, because then it wouldn't be that algorithm anymore and stop working with other implementations of the algorithm. The right thing to do is to encapsulate it in a securely encrypted tunnel, but to have that, you have to check the certificates. If you don't secure the tunnel, an attacker can MITM you and crack the CHAPv2 inside. Not properly securing tunnels is a problem everywhere.
What's so special about Windows Phone 8/7.8 with regards to this issue? If you're not requiring a cert validating the identity of your radius server/access point/whatever, ANY device is going to be vulnerable to a spoofed SSID kind of attack, right?
This is quite the "Oops" on the part of MSFT which, even if this is nothing more than anti-MS FUD, can ill-afford this kind of bad press with a platform which has less than 4% of market share.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
They ought to just call the guy who bought one and explain it to him.
Do you have ESP?
Never met a Zune user, either.
is that no one is using a Windows Phone.
Innovation is the key, he said, pointing out that Microsoft had completely failed to get itself noticed in the tablet and smartphone markets.
"Since I've left [Microsoft], what have they done that's interesting? Microsoft [Xbox] Kinect is the only thing I can think of and for a company that has 90,000 employees, to have only one product that you can point to that's innovative, that's pretty disappointing I think,” he said according to The Age.
"Compare that to Google, which is showing you self-driving cars, Google Glass and a phone that you can talk to, the Moto X, and on and on — automatic picture improvements on Google+ — It's a much more innovative company that is driving the future harder and faster."
One of the reasons why Microsoft fails to innovate right now is the current leadership, Scoble explained, revealing that Steve Ballmer is actually trying to make more money by rolling out innovative technologies.
“I just don't believe Steve Ballmer really likes the future. When I interviewed [him] he said innovation is something cool that makes a lot of money. And that's absolutely not true. [Google Glass] might never make a dollar but it's new, it's interesting [and] it causes conversations. If you're an innovator, you push the future ahead. You don't care whether it necessarily makes a dollar,” he continued.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Former-Employee-Says-That-Microsoft-Is-Not-Longer-Cool-Blames-Steve-Ballmer-373770.shtml
Real Slashdot users don't have girlfriends (or boyfriends for that matter).
So it's 1984, and I'm in a high school math class where I have to write a very simple calendar program on a Sperry computer, never knowing that years later the guy that did the same thing on the Zune would have got a zero and be held up as an epic failure to programmers today. How the fuck do you forget leap years? How the fuck do you mess things up so badly that your device will not even turn on on some days due to that calendar bug? How bad is the quality control to miss such a thing that was a high school level exercise decades ago?
Every year there is a story on slashdot where the perfect response is 'Use Windows, get screwed.' It seems things have not changed much in the last 15 years.
Nice to see WP8 shares the same good foundations as any M$ product. (Captcha: wretches)
One more nail in the coffin of a product which has been dying since it was released.
Come on guys, just how bad of a job are you doing these days?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You put it in quotes so I assumed you were quoting one of the two links you put in but neither state that. I know there's a lot of anti-MS people here but stick to the facts please. I understand that the current solution they offer is not a patch but something that the user needs to do manually, but seriously when you quote something use what they actually said. "Recommendation. Apply the suggested action to require a certificate verifying a wireless access point before starting an authentication process. Please see the Suggested Actions section of this advisory for more information." - from: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2876146
Hows that working out for you, Microsoft?
People already weren't buying your hardware or services before you switched, you think people are ever going to?
People hate you as a company now, like genuinely hate you. They learned your bullshit tactics and now they are finding alternatives.
Shoulda stuck with the OS and Office types. Those were your biggest income.
But you shafted everyone from Vista onwards. You even fucked over Intel and straight up lied to them. Wintel died that year.
Who has your back now?
The problem is that you can't really turn off this behaviour and it does it automatically. Every client (laptop, tablet, phone, other wireless device) that does this fully automatic, may leak Active Directory account data that could be used to actually log on to file servers as well. It's not just MicroSoft that has this problem with PEAP, but that it's apparently not possible (at least not easily) to put some safety measures on the phone so you can mitigate this. I'm sure there will be other PEAP client implementations on other vendors devices that will suffer from this "automatically leaking AD logon data", but apparently, most vendors don't do it as bad as MS?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Who is 'Redmond' by the way?
Reeks of a data funnel for the NSA
Jack of all trades,master of none
I personally contacted MS security people about this years ago before WP8 was released and they told me they would look into this and get back to me guess what I tried to follow up and they never did.
To be very clear the problem is complete lack of necessary levers and knobs to validate the TLS certificate and common name of certificate in WP7-8. Without these options TLS is trivially MITMd this leaves only MS-CHAPv2 which has known to have been completely and publically broke for years.
What is worse they don't even try there is not even a leap of faith latch as there is in other mobile platforms whereby if the cert changes it at least tells you it is different... The system never warns you or anything.
To be even more clear this is not a problem that Microsoft just stumbled on... They knew full goddamn well what the implications of leaving those levers and knobs out of WP7 were... They knew about them circa 2002-2003 when their wireless supplicant was released for XP. They just didn't give a shit.
Microsoft is so dead.
...how many worldwide "lusers" that ought to be using something else....
If the end-user doesn't require a server certificate check then Android is vulnerable too.
Windows Phone 8 have vulnerabilities if nobody uses it.....
They lack innovation because they lack imagination. Ballmer isn't a futurist. Until he, and the entire VP layer, are gone, we will not see innovation from Microsoft. "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." That, in a world with craptastic cell phone UX. The typical houseplant knew it was a dead paradigm on life support, and anyone who came in to do a half way decent job would get significant market share. Microsoft desktop OS lifespan is 12+ years to the point most of it's users not only don't expect innovation, they don't want it. And then for the past ~4 years did the polar opposite with their mobile strategy by having zero legacy compatibility, to the degree hardware was being abandoned (no software updates) days after being announced.
"Compare that to Google, which is showing you self-driving cars, Google Glass and a phone that you can talk to, the Moto X, and on and on â" automatic picture improvements on Google+
Except none of that is really interesting either, because I don't want any of it. And get off my lawn.
They all use iPhones...
In its entire history the Kinect seems to be the only innovative technology, maybe DCOM, they've come up with.
The company is on the other hand absolutely brilliant in marketing, bundling, and contract negotiations.
Anyway, I want a self -FLYING car. That I can talk to.
Ditto. For one cent to a dolllar............
will it blend?!