Hacker News Reader

Comment by whyleyc | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it unsecured public WiFi is significantly more threatening when compared to standard hard-wired Ethernet as all your traffic is visible to any other user connected to the same network with a packet sniffer.

It's much, much harder (but not impossible) to do this on a hard-wired connection - there's a useful discussion as to why here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828201

View on HN

Your personal machine isn't going to be connected through "modern enterprise-grade switches like you would find in a data center," so ARP spoofing is a totally legitimate attack.

Much of that discussion is crap. They're wasting effort bikeshedding about local network sniffing. You have to assume that anything of value sent over the internet might be sniffed or at least could be sniffed by a well placed attacker. The last hop connection between your PC and the AP is hardly the only point at which your data is vulnerable. To assume otherwise is foolhardy.

That's why I said that the only additional risks I can see of an public Wifi is local attacks directly against your machine such as someone port scanning your laptop to look for vulnerable service or open fileshares, etc.

It's much more unlikely that there is a sniffer between your ISP's routers and the target servers for interesting traffic than an attacker listening to your AP traffic. Your ISPs have a vested, primary business interest in keeping their network and peer traffic secure. The coffee shop could care less if people hack each other's Twitter over their AP.

Think about it, say you want to grab somebody's credentials for a popular website. Do you a) hack into their ISP or b) follow them to a coffeeshop and open up Firesheep. What's the easiest angle you are going to take? Local network sniffing isn't the trivial example of sniffing, it's the most vulnerable and probably most exploited target. (Just ask Google.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com