The reason Open WiFi never had encryption is essentially because people argued that if a connection cannot be perfectly secure then it shouldn't try to be secure at all. Or the exact opposite of defense in depth.
Enhanced Open does what we should have been doing since WPA1, Opportunistic Wireless Encryption. It is imperfect, but a substantial improvement over current Open WiFI.
To quote Voltaire "Perfect is the enemy of good."
That's a branding issue: we've been selling "https://" as secure, so we can't go back now and reeducate users. We should have decoupled the idea of security from the protocol used (https can be insecure) and used a separate channel entirely to communicate security, e.g. what browsers are doing now with padlocks or colour schemes. But it's too late to change the SSL UX.
> It prevents the use of a strong password hash (such as bcrypt) when storing passwords (since either the password, or the digested username, realm and password must be recoverable) [1]
Much better to have bcrypt'ed passwords stored on the server and your private SSL keys. If your compromised, revoke the SSL keys, and force users to change their passwords. With strong bcrypt'ed passwords, you can be reasonably sure passwords can't be recovered, but best to enforce resets anyways. With digested passwords, those will be recovered and end up in Troy Hunt's Pwned Passwords database.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_access_authentication...
I know the CA system isn't perfect, but with the certificate transparency efforts it's pretty good. It would give me a trust point for the network I'm connecting to.
Opportunistic encryption without authentication is a major step up, and probably good enough for this scenario.
Having said that, there's no need for a CA as such to make that work.
Probably, SSIDs would need to be globally unique, or somehow couples with a GPS coordinate..
I guess manufacturers could even issues certificates for globally unique SSIDs by allowing costumers to register a sub-domain with them. my-net.my-router.com
Yeah, dealing with CAs is probably overkill for local coffee shops and home networks.
People act like there is 0 harm in prematurely releasing a security feature in a network standard not remembering the various network hardware that will be made based on this don't follow a software development lifecycle where you just publish sprint 2 a few weeks from now with improvements and the world moves on. Even when things get updated wireless clients that are easily updatable (e.g. iOS/Windows devices) are only just recently using TLS 1.2 in their PEAP sessions. We shouldn't be playing fast and lose with security implementation in a future standard just because it sounds nice at first glance and assume sounds nice is better than nothing. What if we decide the next iteration of this design is to rely on PKI to create a chain of trust and now we've created 5 years of shit not working because wireless implementations are so shotty? Similar things have happened with other wireless standard revisions already... hell 802.11ac spent a lot of time and planning on MIMO (which is well established in other radio specifications already) and we still got an entire generation of wireless hardware that worked better without it enabled due to lack of real world vetting.
The best hope in this case is everyone realizes this doesn't provide any meaningful security in the current revision even though it's already available and being pranced around as a great security benefit.
/Rant of a network standards guy
But—correct me if I'm wrong—it does help in the case where you have a home wifi network, that your devices all connect to, and remember the network. It will encrypt all the traffic of your devices. An attacker can't create a different network with the same SSID and trick existing devices to connect to it, right?
If I'm right, then this is quite valuable. It means that most home users can have an encrypted LAN without having to remember the password and tell all their guests what it is whenever they have a visitor.
Can't he? Wouldn't the existing devices just try to connect to whatever broadcasts that SSID.
0: https://emaknyus.blogspot.com/2011/07/airpwn-bringing-goatse... (warning, likely contains goatse - image did not load for me)