Pentesting on a WiFi Adapter : Afirmware and driver security analysis of a WiFi Adapter, with a subset of WiFi pentesting

Sammanfattning: Simple IoT devices such as WiFi adapters have the possibility of containing vulnerabilities because of the vast complexity of parsing and implementing the IEEE 802.11 standard correctly. Many of these adapters contain specific and obscure CPU archetypes, making it difficult to assess their security on the firmware from an ethical hacking standpoint. This thesis aims to identify and report possible vulnerabilities, bugs or exploits in the seemingly unexplored chipset called rtl8188eus from Realtek and its corresponding drivers and firmware within the given limitations. The methods used to assess the security of the adapter are based on the Pentesting standard, STRIDE model and corresponding OWASP lists. Several approaches were attempted to analyse the firmware for potential weaknesses, but all attempts were unsuccessful. Other approaches, such as dynamic testing, gave more promising results. One finding from the dynamic testing resulted in a Linux kernel crash through the WiFi adapter which was made possible with only two types of WiFi frames.