Linux Wi-Fi driver suffers from a major security bug
April 14th, 2007 Leave a comment Visited 33 times, 1 so far today
Linux Wi-Fi driver suffers from a major security bug
Security researchers have warned that the Linux Wi-Fi driver suffers from a major vulnerability which can potentially allow an attacker to take control of a laptop.
The problem is so critical that the attack can happen even when the user is not on a Wi-Fi network. Experts believe that this is the first remotely executable Wi-Fi bug of its kind and specially affects the MadWi-Fi Linux kernel device driver for Atheros-based Wi-Fi chipsets.
Laurent Butti, a researcher from France Telecom Orange discovered this flaw and he had released the relevant information at the last month’s Black Hat conference in Amsterdam.
He said: “You may be vulnerable if you do not manually patch your MadWi-Fi driver.” He did share the problem with the developers of the MadWi-Fi Linux kernel device driver who have now released a patch for the affected users.
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April 16th, 2007 at 06:18 am
There are a couple of problems with this story: 1) It’s old. This vulnerability was announced last December. Most distributions have already released patches. 2) It’s not a linux kernel problem, but rather just an independently developed driver problem. In any case, not a big deal at all.