The dozen vulnerabilities affect all Wi-Fi security protocols since the wireless networking technology debuted in 1997, from WEP up through WPA3. "One design flaw is in the frame aggregation functionality, and another two are in the frame fragmentation functionality," explains Vanhoef in his paper. "These design flaws enable an adversary to forge encrypted frames in various ways, which in turn enables exfiltration of sensitive data." He also identified flaws in the way frame aggregation – combining multiple network data frames – and frame fragmentation – splitting network data frames into smaller pieces – are implemented that magnify the impact of potential attacks. The 802.11 frame aggregation flaw involves flipping an unauthenticated flag in a frame header, which allows the encrypted data payload to get parsed as if it were multiple aggregated frames instead of a simple network packet.