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Ask HN: How to know if public WiFi is secure?
Is there an easy application or web-app to determine if a public wifi hotspot is predatory or legitimate?
- DanAtC 5y agoBest assume it's not and use a VPN.
- 10000truths 5y agoWhat is your threat model? If you’re worried about some rando capturing the airwaves and snooping on your traffic, then you’re secure as long as you’re connected to a WPA2 or WPA3 encrypted network, which pretty much every hotspot supports. If you’re worried about whether you can trust the hotspot itself, then no - trust is a social problem, not a tech problem.
- trblock 5y agoDoesn't the issue of sniffing persist if someone else is connected to the same network? Just power up wireshark and you're good to go?
- db48x 5y agoNo, each session is encrypted separately. Your connection to the wifi router is encrypted with a different session key than someone else’s connection to the same wifi network.
- Nextgrid 5y agoCan't this trivially be worked around by sending deauthentication packets to kick the victim off the network and then capturing the 4-way handshake when they try to reconnect, which you can decrypt without bruteforce because you already know the network's PSK?
- db48x 5y agoThere is a deauthentication attack which can really annoy people, and I think WPA2 can be broken pretty quickly, but I don’t know enough of the details to answer that question.
- Nextgrid 5y agoWhat's your threat model? The vast majority of websites and services use HTTPS or some other protocol over TLS so the data will be encrypted & authenticated regardless of the security of the network itself.
- I_dev_outdoors 5y agoYou know it's secure if your trusted and secure VPN can connect through it. Otherwise, there's really no way to know what they are doing behind the scenes.