In the past few years a number of hotel chains have experimented with Wifi De-associaten attacks to force venue guests off their own Wifi access points. Fortunately the FCC has responded quite sharply and so I haven’t seen further reports about such behavior in the wild. FCC rulings are good, countermeasures are even better. So far I haven’t seen them “in the wild” which was a bit disappointing. Up until now.
Back in 2015 I wrote about De-association attacks and how the 802.11w specification provides a countermeasure with Protected Management Frames (PMF). The Wifi Allicance even made implementation mandatory for 802.11ac devices certificated after a certain date so I was hoping to see implementations already last year. But so far I didn’t. Over the weekend, however I read a test report (behind a paywall and in German) of the Devolo Wifi Pro 1750c access point in which it is specifically stated that 802.11w is supported and that there is a 20-30% performance impact according to the manufacturer. Leaving the performance statement aside for a moment, that’s good news, we are slowly moving in the right direction. Here’s the link to the product description in English (which does not mention 802.11w support).