New kind of attack on RADIUS protocol. Linksys routers sending Wifi passwords out in plain text.

It's quite a long and deep-diving article, I'll try to summerize as well as possible:

• Radius is an authentication protocol that's old but still widely used.
• It makes use of md5, which is highly problamatic, and apparantly no one really noticed until now.
• The researchers were able to come up with an attack where a man-in-the-middle can gain admin access to devices that use RADIUS to authenticate themselves.
• The researchers were able to execute the neccessary hash collision in about five minutes, which isn't very practical considering RADIUS login sessions time out after 30 to 60 seconds. But they were using fairly modest hardware. With the right hardware, it would be a viable attack.
• It affects all authentication modes of RADIUS/UDP apart from those that use EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol).
• In the long run, the only real fix is to use TLS for RADIUS communcations (which apparently has been wip for a long time)

"During routine installation checks, they detected several data packets being transmitted to an AWS server in the US. These packets included the configured SSID name and password in clear text, identification tokens for the network within a broader database, and an access token for a user session". Ouch. Even worse, Linksys had time to respond and fix this since November 2023 but failed to do so.

Interesting opinion piece on how a proper review of the Solarwinds hacks could have mitigated, if not prevented, the later hacks on Microsoft by the Chinese.
An interesting idea in the article, that I hadn't heard before, is to implement a cyber equivalent of the National Transportation Safety Board, the independent agency required to investigate every major aviation accidents. That would definitely be worthwhile.

Pleasant write-up of how US Cyber Command got to sharing malware samples publically, how they perform "Hunt Forward" missions to scoure foreign networks to find malware in use elsewhere, and how data is now shared with the community.

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