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Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

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Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#41
post #7

Unfortunately, while HTTPS is very common, this isn't really the case with HSTS Preload, so active MitM attacks are still a threat.

refresh my understanding, if i manually type "https" into the address bar, then i can't be MitM'ed through lack of HSTS, right?

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#42
post #7

Unfortunately, while HTTPS is very common, this isn't really the case with HSTS Preload, so active MitM attacks are still a threat.

refresh my understanding, if i manually type "https" into the address bar, then i can't be MitM'ed through lack of HSTS, right?

correct, assuming you don't let yourself get tricked into trying without https.

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#43
post #7

Unfortunately, while HTTPS is very common, this isn't really the case with HSTS Preload, so active MitM attacks are still a threat.

refresh my understanding, if i manually type "https" into the address bar, then i can't be MitM'ed through lack of HSTS, right?

You could be.

If you are, you’ll get a message that the very isn’t valid.

Unless there’s an attack on cert providers or someone adds a cert to your device.

The cert approach can be seen in some corporate environments.

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#44

Even if a WPA2 wifi point has a password, isn't the encryption key shared among all connections? I.e, if an attacker has the wifi password, it nullifies the wifi encryption? I recall that fixing this was one of WPA3's selling points.

Not exactly, you need more information than just the WiFi password in order to decrypt the traffic: https://superuser.com/questions/156869/can-other-people-on-a...

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#45
As other people have mentioned, HTTPS without HSTS still makes MitM a problem.

And there are still other attacks possible on public wi-fi networks which don't involve MitM-ing HTTP(s) traffic. MitM DNS traffic and you can do nasty things: https://github.com/infobyte/evilgrade

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

refresh my understanding, if i manually type "https" into the address bar, then i can't be MitM'ed through lack of HSTS, right?

You could be. If you are, you’ll get a message that the very isn’t valid. Unless there’s an attack on cert providers or someone adds a cert to your device. The cert approach can be seen in some corporate environments.

> Unless there’s an attack on cert providers or someone adds a cert to your device.

How does HSTS help with that?

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#47
post #19
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you’re probably not going to be instantly attacked, I still wouldn’t do online banking on a public network.

Every commercial network is a public network in a sense

I suspect the average public network is more secure than the average bank network

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#48
> So when you visit HTTPS sites, anyone along the communication path... can see their domain names (e.g. wikipedia.org) and when you visit them. But these parties can’t see the pages you visit on those sites (e.g. wikipedia.org/controversial-topic), your login name, or messages you send.

I believe this is the reason Turkey blocked the entirety of Wikipedia[0], which was recently lifted[1]. They wanted to block specific pages that revealed negative information (and I believe they did at some point), but when Wikipedia went https only[2] the only avenue was to block the entire domain.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/01/15/access-to-wi...

2:

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#49
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you’re probably not going to be instantly attacked, I still wouldn’t do online banking on a public network.

Honest question... why not? Modern banks use HTTPS throughout. The banks I use all have HSTS and use preloading so no hijacking to a non-HTTPS site. I use a password manager so if somehow I do get hijacked and get sent to a phishing site, and even if that phishing site is using a Lets Encrypt cert to prevent the “Not Secure” banner in a modern browser, my password manager isn’t going to recognize the domain so it wou…

This comments thread literally starts with someone who discovered their bank's app wasn't validating the certificate, though.

Re: Advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date

#50

The EFF is awesome with Let's Encrypt! It was really a dreadful task to buy and renew certificates, especially as out infrastructure back then wasn't that automated. I think this article is a response to all those ads from VPN companies. They do try to scare people about public WiFi's.

One thing I would love to see in the future is the addition of LetsEncrypt support for major web servers like Nginx and Apache. I think this could go a long way. In the case of Apache it would be one of those "mod" type of packages. Someone feel free to let me know if this is already the case though, I would love to make note of it. Edit: Looks like Apache has one called 'md': https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/…

What you're asking for already exists. The certbot package already takes care of that [1]. No need to develop anything extra for nginx. [1] https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntuxenial-nginx
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