Re: Wifi Security

[Christian Kuhtz <christian () kuhtz com>]

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?
You're making an assumption that all these services will work like  
any old AP or traditional WISP, perhaps one with open SSID, which may  
or may not be true.

As far as open SSID is concerned, as you probably already know,  
there's nothing much other than VPN client from a machine you trust  
to some place you trust that is going to help you.  Such is the  
nature of the beast.

As far as other abuse prevention voodoo and other operation and  
implementation specifics, I somehow doubt anyone will spill their  
guts here.  One path to find a few of the answers is to discuss this  
very subject with the equipment vendors in this space, which  
shouldn't infringe on any proprietary information of the operators.

This is still a very much evolving technology as well, so, expect  
fairly rapid developments to address needs as they emerge.

Best regards,
Christian