Re:Inside Apple's Thunderbolt to Ethernet Adapter
by X-Istence on Monday June 25, 2012 @11:44AM
(#4157009)
Thunderbolt requires physical access to the machine. Wireless can leak and potentially be available outside of the building. That it is the biggest concern with Wifi.
Is there a likely hood of WPA2 AES being cracked? Yes, it is very small but it is still possible. Also if a secure device is captured by an attacker and they steal the credentials to access the wireless network they can now come and go as they please. At least with physical they would have to enter the building and plug in.
Are other attacks feasible, absolutely and I will grant that, but having wifi enabled just doesn't work for certain situations and where paranoia runs high due to the work that is being done.
As an aside, if an office is paranoid enough to lock down well encrypted Wifi, I wouldn't be surprised if Thunderbolt got the boot as well.
It's built like Firewire; devices that are plugged in have direct access to the host machine's memory. Though at least it now has the ability to mask off sections of memory.
An attack via a malicious network adapter doesn't sound out of the question. Seems like it would be on the same level of plausibility as sniffing WPA2 traffic and decrypting meaningful information from it.