Saint FragAttacks, Who Reassembles the Pieces His Own Way

Patron of Wi-Fi networks of every era, fragments forgotten in memory, and routers that will never see an update.

Life

On 11 May 2021 Mathy Vanhoef, the same researcher behind KRACK, presented FragAttacks: a dozen Wi-Fi vulnerabilities, three of them in the design of the 802.11 standard itself, present since its beginnings in 1997. By playing with packet aggregation and fragmentation, an attacker within range could inject packets or, in some cases, steal data, on WEP as much as on WPA3. Almost every device was hit by at least one flaw.

Prayer

O Saint FragAttacks, who puts fragments back together as he pleases, let our packets reassemble only from their own pieces. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating routers, network cards and phones, and using HTTPS even on the home network.

A forgotten fragment makes a poisoned packet.