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MS: Windows Phone 8 Wi-Fi Vulnerable, Cannot Be Patched

Posted by timothy on from the is-there-a-workaround-for-the-workaround? dept.

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."

2 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Can't you protect it with HOST files? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Robert Scoble is a former technology evangelist at Microsoft who decided to leave the company in June 2006 to become the vice president of Podtech.net. At that time, it was believed that Scoble had resigned because he was looking for a higher salary elsewhere.

    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

  2. This is a willfull and intentional act by WaffleMonster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.