Overview
- The vulnerability, named WPSplinter by researcher Quentin Kaiser, was publicly disclosed on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, after he told Broadcom about the flaw in July and observed little vendor action.
- WPSplinter stems from two memory‑corruption bugs in Broadcom's implementation of Wi‑Fi Protected Setup (WPS) that let an attacker send crafted WPS messages to execute code on a router.
- In lab tests Kaiser showed attackers can read router memory, extract stored Wi‑Fi passwords, and use those credentials to join victim networks without the owner noticing.
- Broadcom says it issued a partial fix in 2018 and advised vendors to adopt alternative code, but many manufacturers have not rolled out comprehensive firmware updates for affected models.
- Users are advised to check firmware updates, contact their ISP or device maker about specific models, and replace unsupported routers because simply disabling WPS may not reliably block the exploit.