On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
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.
man in the middle is easier if you are the gateway, no need to steal arp
And why worry about Google, etc., when Starbucks and airports have been doing this for _years_?
yup
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.
'most consumers' .. cmon, less than one percent.. seriously.. ymmv tho, eg at airports you stand a higher chance of sniffing a vpn connection but as has been demonstrated many times, even us techies havent got our heads around encryption yet. heres some fun, next time you're at nanog or your favourite geek conference, just run 'tcpdump -w - -s1500 -nn|strings|grep -i password' and be prepared to hit scroll lock ;) Steve