“The issue has to do with Cisco’s Aironet 1200 Series Access Point, which is used to power centrally managed wireless LANs. The Aironet 1200 can be set to a WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) migration mode, in which it provides wireless access for devices that use either the insecure WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) protocol or the more secure WPA standard.

This gives companies a way to gradually move from WEP to WPA without immediately buying all-new, WPA-capable equipment. But while auditing the network of a customer who used the product, Core researchers discovered that even networks that had stopped using WEP devices could still be vulnerable, so long as the Aironet’s migration mode was enabled.

Researchers were able to force the access point to issue WEP broadcast packets, which they then used to crack the encryption key and gain access to the network.”

Anyone that is using this series of access points from Cisco might want to check and make sure that migration mode is not enabled unless absolutely necessary.

[networkworld]