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Wi-Fine

wifine.gitlab.io

31–40 of 57 posts

Re: Wi-Fine

#31
post #14

To me public Wi-Fi is pretty much a honeypot. Most people I know don't rely on it, especially with widespread 4G and mobile phones, so the only people using it are shady figures for whom open and public Wi-Fi is just another step in their OpSec. I figure if you connect to an open Wi-fi and then to a VPN endpoint, you're put on some government list.

At places like Starbucks I wonder what all they do behind the scenes to make sure the network is secure. Like if I go into a mom and pop coffee shop and ask for the WiFi password, that's one thing. But with starbucks all having a standardized wifi infra in their stores, I wonder what sorts of things are happening behind the scenes to make sure everything stays secure. If consumers are worried about WiFi at these places, I bet Starbucks IT obsesses over it.

Re: Wi-Fine

#32
post #14

To me public Wi-Fi is pretty much a honeypot. Most people I know don't rely on it, especially with widespread 4G and mobile phones, so the only people using it are shady figures for whom open and public Wi-Fi is just another step in their OpSec. I figure if you connect to an open Wi-fi and then to a VPN endpoint, you're put on some government list.

But what would they put on that government list exactly? Your mac address?

At least iPhones use a randomized MAC address for WiFi to prevent tracking.

Re: Wi-Fine

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair amount (DNS, etc) is still in the clear, yes. I still see a good amount of clear text web traffic when I do packet captures in airports and the like. Usually image or media files, but the odd time I see some badly conceived automatic update process pulling an exe or msi over plaintext HTTP.

> I still see a good amount of clear text web traffic when I do packet captures in airports and the like. Of all the places I'd avoid packet sniffing, that's high on the list.

Why?

Re: Wi-Fine

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still see a good amount of clear text web traffic when I do packet captures in airports and the like. Of all the places I'd avoid packet sniffing, that's high on the list.

Why?

Because irrespective of the legality of packet sniffing on a network you don't own, airport police have no chill.

Re: Wi-Fine

#35

Getting owned wise - maybe. Privacy wise - no. Not all web traffic is HTTPS, way too much of it still isn't. Not everything is HTTP(S) even, some nastiness comes from other protocols. DNS is still rarely encrypted. NTP basically* isn't encrypted. And all those combined allow a lot of privacy-invasive profiling to be done. Without WPA3 public, it's also passive and you have no clue.

Its still fairly easy to spoof APs. 802.11w aims to prevent this but support is spotty. And a spoofed AP means now the attacker has access to things that would normally gated behind NAT.

Although with use of social engineering, you can set up a gateway page that says something like "Log in to Facebook for free wifi", bypassing the need for any exploits.

Re: Wi-Fine

#36
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair amount (DNS, etc) is still in the clear, yes. I still see a good amount of clear text web traffic when I do packet captures in airports and the like. Usually image or media files, but the odd time I see some badly conceived automatic update process pulling an exe or msi over plaintext HTTP.

Would something like NextDNS help?

Firefox has built-in support for DNS over HTTPS using NextDNS or Cloudflare

Re: Wi-Fine

#37

In this space, if you have WPA3 then there's no benefit to having a "password" for WiFi which actually is public knowledge. In WPA and WPA2 the password means network use is encrypted, which means a completely passive adversary can't just snoop the network so long as there's a password. But in WPA3 even without a password everything is encrypted anyway, your station says "Hey, I'm joining this network here's a number…

> The institution where you're a guest knows your identity (often email address),

The identity in the outer EAP does not have to be your real identity, just the realm (@domain.dom) must be correct so the radius proxying can be routed appropriately. E.g., anonymous@example.edu in the outer EAP will work fine for the user, jdoe@example.edu.

Re: Wi-Fine

#38
post #28

In this space, if you have WPA3 then there's no benefit to having a "password" for WiFi which actually is public knowledge. In WPA and WPA2 the password means network use is encrypted, which means a completely passive adversary can't just snoop the network so long as there's a password. But in WPA3 even without a password everything is encrypted anyway, your station says "Hey, I'm joining this network here's a number…

I worked in IT support as an undergrad ten years ago and am now going to grad school and using eduroam. It is such a night-and-day difference; I'm so incredibly pleased that there was enough international and inter-institutional cooperation to make it work. I especially like it when I open up my laptop at a new coffee shop and discover it's already connected to eduroam—in the city I live in (Edinburgh) there are enou…

Same deal in my city. Very cool!

... it also raises questions about what would be so hard to just distribute WiFi access to all citizens.

Re: Wi-Fine

#39
"Additional, HSTS (with preloading) is quite widely deployed (especially at big cloud services), which makes plain text downgrade attacks hard to deploy."

looooooooooooool

Turns out, that was a lie

Re: Wi-Fine

#40
post #39

"Additional, HSTS (with preloading) is quite widely deployed (especially at big cloud services), which makes plain text downgrade attacks hard to deploy." looooooooooooool Turns out, that was a lie

Is it? I just checked https://hstspreload.org/, and it seems that twitter.com, facebook.com, outlook.com, cloudflare.com and gmail.com are all preloaded.

Or do you mean that downgrade attacks are still easy to deploy? Under what circumstances?

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