The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

October 27

Pixie DustHoly card for pixie-dust, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 WPS Pixie Dust PULVIS WPS
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Blessed Pixie Dust, Who Guessed the WPS PIN

Patron of home routers with the WPS button, eight-digit PINs, and everyone who thought Wi-Fi was safe.

Life

In October 2014 Dominique Bongard presented the "pixie dust" attack at the hack.lu conference: many routers generated the WPS protocol's random numbers with so little entropy that the eight-digit PIN could be computed in seconds, offline, from a single exchange with the router. From there you recovered the Wi-Fi password. Tools like pixiewps put the attack within anyone's reach.

Prayer

O Blessed Pixie Dust, who computes the PIN like dust in the wind, let our routers forget WPS. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by disabling WPS on the router and choosing a long, random Wi-Fi password.

Little entropy, little defence.

Technical record

Disclosed on
October 27 2014
CVE
No CVE: blessed, not yet canonized by MITRE

Sources: archive.hack.lu · web.archive.org · kali.org

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