Reading this, it sounds like a collection of different attacks on different mechanism up and down the stack is at play in this article. It'd be useful to know w

Reading this, it sounds like a collection of different attacks on different mechanism up and down the stack is at play in this article. It'd be useful to know which ones, though I acknowledge that the article is probably not targeted towards an audience that would either want to know about or would understand the details of say, SSL stripping. One thing that occurs to me is that the 1st stage of the attack described -- sniffing and spoofing probe requests -- could possibly be defeated, or at least made more difficult if the mobile wifi station authenticated the identity of the wifi base station before continuing with the rest of the auth/association sequence. Reading up on that sequence, I'm getting the impression that the mobile station doesn't do that, rather, it blindly trusts any base station with an ESSID and auth mechanism that match the one it's configured to connect to. If I'm right, that seems like a rather horrible oversight from a security perspective. This leads me to another train of thought. The wifi standard is an IEEE one. The name, IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, suggests its constituents approach things from a perspective of "These are the known laws of physics. How do we dance within those rules to implement $goal in a cost-effective manner?" I don't see how the security implications of chosen implementation details would enter into design normally. This isn't a condemnation, just some observation and speculation. I similarly wouldn't expect an building architect to think about the security implications of an office's plumbing normally either unless I explicitly requested such. As digital technology continues its seemingly inexorable march towards continued integration with our lives, I think it's well past time we start thinking more the security implications of our creations, and asking our peers to do the same.