p2p news / p2pnet: BlueBag was a recent Italian experiment designed to highlight vulnerabilities in Bluetooth devices.

Now two researchers have used LORCON (Loss of Radio Connectivity), an open-source 802.11 hacking tool, to throw an extremely large number of wireless packets at different wireless cards.

The result?

The, “digital equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” as InfoWorld has one of them, research engineer David Maynor, saying.

An attacker could exploit the flaw, called fuzzing, “by simply sitting in a public space and waiting for the right type of machine to come into range,” says the story.

Hackers use it to see if they can cause programs to fail, or perhaps even run unauthorized software when they are bombarded with unexpected data.

Victims wouldn’t even need to be hooked up, InfoWorlkd goes on, quoting the other researcher, Jon Ellch, a student at the US Naval postgraduate school in Monterey, California, as saying:

“You don’t have to necessarily be connected for these device driver flaws to come into play. Just because your wireless card is on and looking for a network could be enough.”

“Wireless device drivers are like the Wild, Wild West right now,” Maynor said. “LORCON has really brought mass Wi-Fi packet injection to script kiddies.

“Now it’s pretty much to the point where anyone can do it.”

Lorcon is the work of Joshua Wright, security architect of Aruba, and author of a previous tool which exposed a Cisco flaw, as well as a mover in IEEE 802.11w Wi-Fi security, says TechWorld.

The hack will be demonstrated at the August 2 Black Hat USA 2006 conference, it says, also emphasing Maynor and Ellch don’t plan to go into detail before then.

Digg this story.

Also See:
highlight vulnerabilities - Bluetooth attack warning, June 8, 2006
InfoWorld - Researchers hack Wi-Fi driver to breach laptop, June 1, 2006
TechWorld - Wi-Fi drivers open laptops to hackers, June 22, 2006

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