WiFi Exploitation: How passive interception leads to active exploitation

When was the last time you thought to yourself, hmm, I wonder if an attacker is exploiting my smart phone and laptop as a result of merely leaving my WiFi enabled? Or, when did you think: I wonder if a person can create a profile about me and possibly determine where I live, work, and places I have been simply via passive interception of the 802.11x frames beaconed from my devices? Ok, let’s go a bit further: when was the last time you realized your smart phone is wirelessly leaking details regarding every network you have stored on your device for everyone to see and when did you ever consider that an attacker could intercept your beacons, establish a rogue AP mimicking exactly what you are looking for, and MiTM your system directly back to the attacker automatically? Do you even know the information your smart phone is constantly broadcasting out via that wireless NIC of yours?

Well, if any of these questions take you by surprise, then this talk may be of particular interest to you. I will show you exactly how to engineer a distributed sensor network that captures, parses, interprets, and visualizes 802.11x frames/messages in order to build the picture of devices communicating within the sensor mesh. Next, I show how to build the connector agents to resolve GPS location of devices in the area and extracted from your device’s broadcasted frames. From here I’ll show you how we interface with Google Map to interactively display the location profiles we create on users intercepted within the area. We will look at carrying out MiTM attacks based on what your device is requesting to automatically exploit the user without their knowledge. We conclude with enhancements required to better secure your devices from future exploitation.

This talk wouldn’t be complete without a brand new tool release! Developing a framework like this is not as difficult or costly as you might think. I’ll show you exactly how to do it. And if the coding and parsing of raw 802.11 frames is not your cup of tea, no worries at all. This talk releases and demo’s a new framework I’ve built called Theia Sensor Suite that automatically analyzes all of this data and visualizes it for you in a robust GUI and framework. 802.11 exploitation will never go away, so let’s get started!

Presented by

Links