North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Wifi Security

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Mon Nov 21 09:48:55 2005 
On Nov 21, 2005, at 9:42 AM, Ross Hosman wrote:
So my question is pretty simple. You have all these major companies such
as google/earthlink/sprint/etc. building wifi networks. Lets say I want
to collect peoples information so I setup an AP with the same ssid as
google's ap so people connect to it and I log all of their traffic. Most
people won't check beyond the ssid to look at the mac address but even
that could be spoofed. Is there anyway to verify a certain ap beyond
mac/ssid, will there be in the future? How do these companies plan to
mitigate this threat or are they just going to hope consumers are smart
enough to figure it out?
Why would you even need to set up an AP? Why not just sit and sniff traffic? Gets you the _exact_ same information.

And why worry about Google, etc., when Starbucks and airports have been doing this for _years_?

Lastly, most consumers are smart enough to know to use encryption (the little pad-lock in their browser). Some aren't. Changing the WiFi architecture is not going to save those who aren't.

--
TTFN,
patrick