According to an InfoWorld article: “You don't have to necessarily be connected for these device driver flaws to come into play,” Ellch said. “Just because your wireless card is on and looking for a network could be enough.”
This is a very interesting attack vector: either the device drivers could accept data directly (just from the fact they are turned on) or they needed to wait for a reply (real or spoofed) from an access point.
Either way, it is another example that the interpretation (or parsing) of data* (in this case 802.11 data) is always subject to potential flaws.
*By data, I mean any bits sent across the wire. Of course, they will be interpreted differently at different levels in the stack, so parsing errors can occur at each of these various levels. I include memory errors such as buffer overflows as parsing errors since user supplied input is processed by the program. These types of errors may be distinguished from errors such as ACL errors. Could my category of interpretation / parsing be finer here? Yes. But I do not know the exact nature of the flaws at this point.
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