AirSnitch “breaks worldwide Wi-Fi encryption, and it might need the potential to enable advanced cyberattacks,” Xin’an Zhou, the lead creator of the research paper, said in an interview. “Advanced attacks can construct on our primitives to [perform] cookie stealing, DNS and cache poisoning. Our research physically wiretaps the wire altogether so these sophisticated attacks will work. It’s really a threat to worldwide network security.” Zhou presented his research on Wednesday on the 2026 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium.
Previous Wi-Fi attacks that overnight broke existing protections reminiscent of WEP and WPA worked by exploiting vulnerabilities within the underlying encryption they used. AirSnitch, against this, targets a previously missed attack surface—the bottom levels of the networking stack, a hierarchy of architecture and protocols based on their functions and behaviors.
The bottom level, Layer-1, encompasses physical devices reminiscent of cabling, connected nodes, and all of the things that allow them to speak. The best level, Layer-7, is where applications reminiscent of browsers, email clients, and other Web software run. Levels 2 through 6 are often called the Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, and Presentation layers, respectively.
Identity crisis
Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and a pair of and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and better layers, other nodes, and other network names reminiscent of SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). This cross-layer identity desynchronization is the important thing driver of AirSnitch attacks.
Probably the most powerful such attack is a full, bidirectional machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, meaning the attacker can view and modify data before it makes its solution to the intended recipient. The attacker might be on the identical SSID, a separate one, or perhaps a separate network segment tied to the identical AP. It really works against small Wi-Fi networks in each homes and offices and huge networks in enterprises.
