In 2025, researchers published 937 new wireless-related CVEs. That works out to roughly 2.5 new vulnerabilities per day. If your wireless security strategy has not been reviewed since your last AP refresh, you are very likely exposed in ways you have not been told about.

Furthermore, this is not a consumer problem. These vulnerabilities target enterprise-grade protocols, chipsets, and the authentication stacks that enterprise IT teams have trusted for years. Specifically, the wireless CVE category grew from 4 disclosures in 2010 to 937 in 2025. That is a 230-times increase. Moreover, wireless disclosures are growing at more than 20 times the rate of CVE disclosures across all technology categories combined.

Therefore, wireless security needs a serious audit in 2026. Here is what that audit should focus on.

The Attack Your Vendors Are Not Warning You About

Researchers recently published details on a class of attacks called AirSnitch. These attacks exploit subtle flaws in the way protocol standards interact with network infrastructure. Notably, AirSnitch does not break WPA3 outright. Instead, it exploits the gap between what the protocol promises and what the underlying infrastructure actually enforces.

Specifically, AirSnitch affects Wi-Fi devices from multiple major vendors and operates across Android, macOS, iOS, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux. Consequently, no single vendor patch will close this gap. The fix requires changes at the infrastructure level, not just on endpoints.

Additionally, the attack is effective against WPA2-Enterprise and WPA3-Enterprise environments. In practice, this means networks that IT teams consider properly secured are still exploitable under the right conditions. However, the risk is not theoretical. Researchers have demonstrated these techniques against real enterprise deployments.

WPA3 Is Not a Silver Bullet

WPA3 was supposed to close the door on most legacy Wi-Fi attack vectors. In many ways, it has. Nevertheless, deployment complexity has introduced a new category of risk that is easy to overlook.

The first problem is transition mode. Many enterprise networks run WPA3 and WPA2 simultaneously to support older devices. However, transition mode exposes the network to downgrade attacks. An attacker forces a capable device to authenticate via WPA2 instead of WPA3. Therefore, the security improvement of WPA3 does not apply to that connection.

The second problem is evil twin vulnerabilities. Researchers have assessed WPA3-Enterprise against evil twin attack scenarios and found a consistent weakness. Specifically, the protocol relies partly on user decision-making during certificate validation. When an employee sees an unfamiliar certificate warning, many will click through. As a result, rogue access points succeed not by breaking encryption but by exploiting the human in the chain.

The third problem is cipher suite gaps. WPA3-Enterprise supports stronger cipher suites including 192-bit security mode. However, many enterprise deployments do not enforce them. Notably, mandating support in a standard does not mean vendors ship devices with those features enabled by default. In many cases, IT teams assume strong ciphers are active when they are not configured at all.

Zero Trust Wireless Is the Framework Worth Building Toward

Zero Trust Wireless operates on one core principle. No device is trusted by default, regardless of whether it is on the corporate network. Furthermore, every device must prove its identity before being granted access, and that verification happens continuously, not just at connection time.

In practice, Zero Trust Wireless rests on three pillars. The first is certificate-based authentication via EAP-TLS. Each device receives a unique X.509 certificate. Consequently, the RADIUS server validates that certificate during the 802.1X handshake. This eliminates shared passwords entirely. Additionally, it makes rogue AP attacks significantly harder because a rogue AP cannot reproduce a legitimate certificate exchange.

The second pillar is rogue AP detection. Specifically, this means deploying dedicated wireless monitoring that detects unauthorized access points regardless of the encryption or authentication method they use. In many environments, rogue APs operate on the same channel as production infrastructure. Without active monitoring, IT teams never see them.

The third pillar is SIEM integration. Overall, wireless security events are only useful if someone is reviewing them. Furthermore, SIEM integration lets teams correlate wireless authentication failures, deauthentication floods, and unusual roaming behavior against other network events. In practice, this is where most enterprise wireless environments fall short. They generate logs and nobody reads them.

What This Means for Your Network in 2026

The risk profile of enterprise wireless has changed significantly in the past three years. Additionally, the attack surface has expanded beyond access points and clients. Today it includes IoT sensors, building management systems, and industrial controllers that connect wirelessly and cannot be patched on a standard enterprise timeline.

For Canadian IT teams specifically, the practical steps are straightforward. First, audit your EAP method configuration and confirm you are not running PEAP-MSCHAPv2 in 2026. Second, enforce certificate validation on all enterprise SSIDs and stop relying on user acknowledgment of certificate warnings. Third, deploy wireless intrusion detection if you do not have it. Finally, review your RADIUS configuration for cipher suite enforcement and confirm WPA3 is not running in transition mode unless you have a specific reason to support legacy devices.

None of this is complex in isolation. However, it requires someone who has actually done it to configure it correctly. That is where the risk compounds. Most IT teams inherit wireless infrastructure they did not design and have never fully audited.

Have questions about how these developments affect your network? Reach out to the Baiden Group team.