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kd913yesterday at 7:12 PM4 repliesview on HN

If this is true, I feel teh wifi alliance have a tonne to answer for the ewaste they generate.

WPA3 moved from symmetric AES to ECDH which is vulnerable to Quantum. Gonna be a tonne of IOT inverters waste.


Replies

supernetworks_yesterday at 7:13 PM

WPA3 moved from PBKDF to ECDH. AES CCMP and GCMP are still the underlying block ciphers in WPA3 with some other extensions for China

tptacekyesterday at 7:53 PM

For what it's worth, cryptography engineers were generally not happy with the Dragonfly PAKE, and PQC was a legitimate concern even in 2012.

dlcarrieryesterday at 9:05 PM

Just yesterday I used an IoT device with WEP as the only WiFi option. Needless tosay, I use the wired connection.

The say the 's' in IoT stands for secure, and from my experience that is true. Pretty much nothing is getting thrown out, because it isn't secure.

evil-oliveyesterday at 7:37 PM

WPA3 was announced in 2018 [0]. I don't think it's reasonable to blame them for not anticipating the next decade of cryptographic research.

...but even if they had, what realistically could they have done about it? ML-KEM was only standardized in 2024 [1].

also, the addition of ECDH in WPA3 was to address an existing, very real, not-theoretical attack [2]:

> WPA and WPA2 do not provide forward secrecy, meaning that once an adverse person discovers the pre-shared key, they can potentially decrypt all packets encrypted using that PSK transmitted in the future and even past, which could be passively and silently collected by the attacker. This also means an attacker can silently capture and decrypt others' packets if a WPA-protected access point is provided free of charge at a public place, because its password is usually shared to anyone in that place.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access#WPA3

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-KEM

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access#Lack_of...

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