[FRC Blog] Einstein Report Released

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

FIRST's deauth vector is not new, Hack-A-Day exposed this very publicly last year and other sites well before that. All that was required to breach this? Download code.

I don't think you understand what the actual problem was. The system is indeed vulnerable to a deauthentication flood, or even a fast trickle. However, there were no such attempts detected, and there is no evidence to suggest that any occurred. The testing did show that it was possible to disrupt the connection without triggering a warning, so the detection parameters need to be tweaked to something more appropriate to the FRC use case. Still, it doesn't look like this was something that actually happened during competition.

The confirmed problem was instead an unknown and unexpected bug in the access point firmware that broke the existing connection when another client tried to authenticate and failed. Nothing special needs to be downloaded in order to cause this bug to be expressed.