This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Larry Greenmin.

It seems every week we find out that someone broke into a big company's databases,

like the recent Equifax data breach and made off with

millions of credit card numbers, passwords and other valuable info. And now a new

kind of worry someone could hijack your wireless home network and steal your info from under your nose.

That's the possibility raised by a couple of cyber security researchers from the Catholic University of

Luvan in Belgium. The problem they say is a flaw in the very protocol meant to make

Wi-Fi secure. That protocol is called Wi-Fi protected access to WPA-2 and

WPA-2's weakness could allow an attacker within physical range of your Wi-Fi network

to make a copy of that network that they could then control.

The researchers call their approach a key reinstallation attack or crack.

It's important to know that a crack attack remains a hypothetical for now.

The scientists realize a threat while investigating wireless security.

They'll present this research on November 1st

at the Computer and Communications Security Conference in Dallas

and in December at the Black Hat Europe Conference in London.

In their crack scenario, wireless devices would be fooled into connecting to the bogus network,

and the attacker would be able to access all of the info that devices send and receive while connected to that network,

even if that info has been

encrypted. Android and Linux would be especially vulnerable because of how

their encryption keys are configured. One measure of protection against such an

...