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GeminiJ13's avatar
GeminiJ13
Aspirant
Oct 25, 2017
Solved

NETGEAR INC. vs. Krack WPA-2 vunerability

Dear NETGEAR,   I can't even e-mail you to shame you on why it is that you haven't gotten a patch out to us to fix this CRITICAL vunerability with our routers.  Are you that afraid of your owners t...
  • TheEther's avatar
    Oct 25, 2017

    There is a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) and misinformation going around about KRACK.

     

    It may help you to know that KRACK generally targets Wi-Fi clients, such as smartphones, laptops and PC's with Wi-Fi adapters. Also affected are range extenders/repeaters, which also effectively work as clients.

     

    Routers and Access Points (AP) are generally not affected, unless they support fast transition, or if they are reconfigured to function as a bridge, range extender or repeater. Most of Netgear's routers don't support fast transition. AFAIK, the only exception is Orbi, and even there I believe fast transition can be disabled.  So, while there is cause to be concerned about KRACK, the fault generally doesn't lie with your router.

     

    As to support, yeah, Netgear's support leaves a little something to be desired, but it's probably par for the course for many companies to be difficult to reach. Live support is expensive and frankly not all that helpful. Answers are usually available on the Internet or here on this forum if you search. It wasn't very hard to find one of Netgear's advisories on KRACK:
    https://kb.netgear.com/000049498/Security-Advisory-for-WPA-2-Vulnerabilities-PSV-2017-2826-PSV-2017-2836-PSV-2017-2837