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evil-oliveyesterday at 7:37 PM1 replyview on HN

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...


Replies

ndriscollyesterday at 7:45 PM

Does it matter if an attacker can decrypt public wifi traffic? You already have to assume the most likely adversary (e.g. the most likely to sell your information) is the entity running the free wifi, and they can already see everything.

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