Multi-channel man-in-the-middle attacks against protected wi-fi networks: a state of the art review

Abstract

Multi-Channel Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks are special MitM attacks capable of manipulating encrypted wireless frames between two legitimate endpoints. Since its inception in 2014, attackers have been targeting Wi-Fi networks to perform different attacks, such as cipher downgrades, denial of service, key reinstallation attacks (KRACK) in 2017, and recently FragAttacks in 2021, which widely impacted millions of Wi-Fi devices, especially IoT devices. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies in the literature that holistically review the different types of Multi-Channel MitM enabled attacks and analyze their potential impact. To this end, we evaluate the capabilities of Multi-Channel MitM and review every reported attack in the state of the art. We examine practical issues that hamper the total adoption of protection mechanisms, i.e., security patches and Protected Management Frames (PMF), and review available defense mechanisms in confronting the Multi-Channel MitM enabled attacks in the IoT context. Finally, we highlight the potential research problems and identify future research approaches in this field.