Dear Reader,

Once it was announced to the public, the news of the KRACK attack spread quickly over the Internet – a flaw in the handshake system for wireless devices that allows an attacker to compromise encryption. According to reports, the attack puts almost all devices that engage in WPA2-encrypted wireless networking at risk. Early warnings said Android was most vulnerable, but later updates reported that Windows, iOS, macOS, and OpenBSD were also at risk. Linux wasn't safe either, with several versions of the wpa_supplicant utility marked as vulnerable. Although the problem was publicly announced in October, vendors were warned privately in May, and many are already well along finding solutions.

The KRACK attack is particularly significant because everybody is using wireless networking. Many people younger than 21 just look bewildered if you show them a Cat 5 networking cable. Such things don't exist in their world, because wireless is everywhere – at the library, at the malt shop, in the home. One of the reasons for the recent explosion in wireless networking is that everybody trusts it now, and they trust it because they have this general sense that the glaring security issues that made everyone nervous about wireless in the first place have somehow been resolved. If you asked many security experts in the past couple years, they would say wireless networking is fine as long as you:

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