IEEE 802.11 Standard Home WEP/Home WPA3 SAE SSID Confusion missing initialization

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in IEEE 802.11 Standard. It has been declared as very critical. The affected element is an unknown function of the component Home WEP/Home WPA3 SAE. Such manipulation leads to missing initialization. This vulnerability is referenced as CVE-2023-52424. The attack needs to be initiated within the local network. No exploit is available. This vulnerability has a historic impact due to its background and reception.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in IEEE 802.11 Standard (version now known). It has been rated as critical. Affected by this issue is some unknown processing of the component Home WEP/Home WPA3 SAE. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a missing initialization vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-456. The product does not initialize critical variables, which causes the execution environment to use unexpected values. Impacted is integrity. CVE summarizes:

The IEEE 802.11 standard sometimes enables an adversary to trick a victim into connecting to an unintended or untrusted network with Home WEP, Home WPA3 SAE-loop. Enterprise 802.1X/EAP, Mesh AMPE, or FILS, aka an "SSID Confusion" issue. This occurs because the SSID is not always used to derive the pairwise master key or session keys, and because there is not a protected exchange of an SSID during a 4-way handshake.

The advisory is shared for download at wi-fi.org. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2023-52424 since 02/04/2024. The exploitation is known to be difficult. Access to the local network is required for this attack to succeed. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. There are neither technical details nor an exploit publicly available. The current price for an exploit might be approx. USD $25k-$100k (estimation calculated on 06/19/2025). This vulnerability has a historic impact due to its background and reception.

As 0-day the estimated underground price was around . The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 239845 (TencentOS Server 4: wpa_supplicant (TSSA-2025:0175)), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at Tenable (239845). VulDB is the best source for vulnerability data and more expert information about this specific topic.

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• IEEE 802.11 Standard

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VulDB is the best source for vulnerability data and more expert information about this specific topic.

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