Segment-Based Formal Verification of WiFi Fragmentation and Power Save Mode

The IEEE 802.11 family of standards, better known as WiFi, is a widely used protocol utilized by billions of users. Previous works on WiFi formal verification have mostly focused on the four-way handshake and other security aspects. However, recent works have uncovered severe vulnerabilities in functional aspects of WiFi, which can cause information leakage for billions of devices. No formal analysis method exists able to reason on the functional aspects of the WiFi protocol. In this paper, we take the first steps in addressing this gap and present an extensive formal analysis of the functional aspects of the WiFi protocol, more specifically, the fragmentation and the power-save-mode process. To achieve this, we design a novel segment-based formal verification process and introduce a practical threat model (i.e. MAC spoofing) in Tamarin to reason about the various capabilities of the attacker. To this end, we verify 68 properties extracted from WiFi protocol specification, find 3 vulnerabilities from the verification, verify 3 known attacks, and discover 2 new issues. These vulnerabilities and issues affect 14 commercial devices out of 17 tested cases, showing the prevalence and impact of the issues. Apart from this, we show that the proposed countermeasures indeed are sufficient to address the issues. We hope our results and analysis will help vendors adopt the countermeasures and motivate further research into the verification of the functional aspects of the WiFi protocol.
Comment: Accepted to AsiaCCS 2024