ActiveSync, TCP/IP and 802.11b Wireless Vulnerabilities of WinCE-based PDAs
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Author
Pascal Meunier, Sofie Nystrom, Seny Kamara, Scott Yost, Kyle Alexander, Dan Noland, Jared Crane
Tech report number
CERIAS TR 2002-17
Entry type
inproceedings
Abstract
Researching the vulnerabilities and security concerns of WinCE-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in an 802.11 wireless environment resulted in identifying CAN-2001-{0158 to 0163}. The full understanding and demonstration of some vulnerabilities would have required reverse engineering ActiveSync, which was beyond the scope of this research. Moreover, the WinCE IP stack demonstrated unstabilities under a number of attacks, one of which produced symptoms in hardware. The inaccessibility of the 802.11b standard documentation was a source of delays in the research; however, we created three proof-of-concept applications to defeat 802.11b security. One collects valid MAC
addresses on the network, which defeats MAC-address based restrictions. Another builds a code book using known-plaintext attacks, and the third decrypts 802.11b traffic on-the-fly using the code book.
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Date
2002 – June – 10-12
Booktitle
Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collabrative Enterprises
Institution
CERIAS
Key alpha
Meunier
Organization
CERIAS
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society
School
Purdue University
Affiliation
Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance Security
Publication Date
2001-01-01
Keywords
WinCE, WEP, ActiveSync, wireless, security, 802.11b, vulnerability
Language
English
Location
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

