82% of People Say They Connect to Any Free WiFi That’s Available in Public
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No, they are not. They will never be. They might be secure, but not completely. It is true that we are getting safer, but you should not stop thinking about the risks that will never go away.
Do you really need to check you email on a public wifi? If it's not necessary, then just don't do it. It's the small things. Sure you can take this into the extreme (which is never a bad thing in this case), but even if we don't, then we should not teach people that every public wifi is perfectly fine. Please remain thoughtful.
Likewise, your threat of being preyed upon on an open AP is dependent on what you're doing on that AP. Surfing HN? Who cares. But if I'm checking my bank account balance or touching sensitive info, I'm absolutely going to fire up a vpn first.
> No, they are not. They will never be. They might be secure, but not completely...
But we take risks ALL THE TIME. In a primitive sense, risk assessment can be thought of as a product...
risk = severity_of_outcome x probability_of_occurence
A lot of these things are unclear-- even for "experts" on HN.
In the absence of actual credible stories about the bad things that happen on public wifi, people will DISMISS the risk. Some may choose a more paranoid approach and never use public wifi, but I think that's just about as unreasonable as the opposite.
No. They are an insecure transport, like most of the internet. The majority of high profile sites, services, and apps will now use TLS by default, but this is one of the few edge cases where a reputable VPN provider would help protect end users from poorly secured apps and services. I would trust the VPN folks vetted by Mozilla, but I am biased because I worked at Mozilla for years and have a great deal of trust for the folks there, or for the technical audience at HN I would recommend using one of the cloud service provider templates for standing up your own VPN server.
My understanding is a MITM attack can happen between your VPN provider and the service, just like it may work on the wifi point.
Without digging into too much detail, or providing a whack of data because I am not writing long form about this and I spent too much time writing comments on HN this morning :P, but my observation has been that the majority of unsecured apps have service endpoints that are deployed in cloud service provider environments, so if you have a VPN end point that terminates inside the same region, then it is highly unlikely that your traffic will hit the Internet before arriving at it's destination. That said, it's TCP/IP, so all it takes is a routing change and all of those assumptions go out the window...
Beyond that, MITM and traffic monitoring is happening all of the time in many network service providers, not all of it's nefarious -- alot of traffic analysis is just sampling to make sure that the network is working well and to understand whats happening. That said, there are many service providers and jurisdictions that opportunistically capture data or modify traffic in flight for purposes other than quality of service (e.g. ISPs injecting advertisements into HTTP traffic, surveillance, etc)
Using a VPN in this way doesn't protect you against those kinds of threats - the value in using a VPN here is about preventing local eavesdroppers from monitoring network metadata that can be used to classify your traffic and track you.
There are many examples, but one clear one is for marginalized people, such as folks from the LGBT community using specific apps (e.g. gay dating apps such Grindr or Growlr) that could out them to a monitoring service while in a jurisdiction or community hostile to them. Having that traffic tunneled safely to a "known safe" destination, e.g. an AWS or GCP instance in a safer region, would provide a measure of protection.
I had a discussion with a colleague about this about a year ago, but I think it would be very awesome to build an open source VPN service that leveraged AWS & GCP VPCs and inter region peering so that it would egress in the same cloud provider regions as destination IP blocks to prevent as much traffic as possible from flowing over the public internet, but I haven't had the time to put into it.
It's not a hard experiment to run, and "mainstream" has different meanings in different locations. Get a femto cell or other remote access point set up an open wireless network in a high traffic area, especially in a place where there is a transit hub, and hang out for several hours.
You could also grab the Alexa top 1 million or Cisco Umbrella top 1 million, and scan them for http endpoints, and work backward from there for sites that don't bounce you to a TLS endpoint.
Does mozilla have a list of "vetted" VPNs? I'm interested in seeing that list.
Besides, it's not like we should ever trust a search engine as an authority on anything but the results that bring the host company more money.
It's undoubtedly less secure and it's upside is...what exactly?
You seem to be suggesting that if I intend to visit mywebsite.com, that typing "myw", seeing "mywebsite.com", and hitting enter is somehow less deliberate than typing "mywebsit.com" and going to a site that was not my intent.
Given that only the first one of these things reflects my intent, describing the second as deliberate and the first as not-deliberate requires some odd twisting of definitions.
Your fear, it seems to be, is that tools we use might influence how we act. This is nothing new. Stories started to rhyme less when we figured out how to write things instead of memorizing them. That was still probably undoubtedly an improvement. So can you perhaps clarify what specific influences that our tools have might be bad? For example, my browser suggesting "mywatertower.com" instead of "mywebsite.com" because the first paid for a higher position.
That seems a reasonable end state to fear, but I have no reason to believe we're heading that direction. Do you? Is inconveniencing (literally) billions of people and forcing them to take less secure paths to do what they want worth avoiding a possibility that certainly doesn't seem imminent?
Then again, when users stopped having to specify protocol for every server, that was probably the beginning of the end of deliberate browsing. My fear is really that people take the Web and the Internet as a whole for granted; and I want to see procedures put in place to demand that all users be aware of their actions, what data they share with servers, and all of what's being downloaded to their computer.
I don't like having to remind people that there is no "Cloud", only someone else's computer. And you're saying you trust that other person's machine and security more than your own by storing critical data there. Or pointing out what having one CDN for so much of the Web did last month.
Should you be unable to drive unless you can, IDK, build an automatic transmission? This point of view reduces, as far as I can tell, to the idea that good user interfaces should only be extended to those privileged with enough expertise to build them themselves.
This requires a level of literacy that most users will never be able to meet, by virtue of most people not having time to learn a programming language since they have other responsibilities.
It's also not clear why you aren't extending this backwards: why is it okay to use a browser I didn't write myself (or at least compile from source)? What about my OS? Do you really expect every user to have full knowledge of their entire system? That puts severe limits on the potential tooling we can use, and goes counter to one of the core ideas of software engineering: abstraction.
> And you're saying you trust that other person's machine and security more than your own by storing critical data there.
Yes, I trust security teams and engineers whose job is security and reliability more so than I trust myself, in much the same way that I'd trust a surgeon to do surgery better than myself. I realize that there's certification/training differences that may be relevant, but in general, the same ideas apply.
“You typo an address” — well, then, sure. But how did you manage to typo an address that’s exactly where the attacker put their stuff, and the bank didn’t catch them?
Now, if you meant “type”, then NO. Unless the browser includes a certificate authority that gave out a certificate to the attacker for that domain, the browser will flag this “valid” SSL cert.
There are risks, and fortunately they are reducing.
A VPN is still a good idea.
So y'all and I don't see a risk, but a malicious actor sees a valid strategy.
I disagree with the comment "go out of your way to fall victim to any MITM attack". If you're trusting employer provided or controlled equipment and haven't personally verified the certificate lists, they totally could MITM your connections without your knowledge if they've already added the exceptions. I know some employers do this, and I know network equipment vendor sales staff have used the ability to MITM employees as an explicit product feature and sales tactic including boasting about the ease with which they can procure faked certs for Google, Microsoft, et al, for this purpose.
App stores require apps use https nowadays, and nobody is MITMing https, full stop.
If you want to talk about risks of using public wifi, then privacy should be the topic. DNS queries are not encrypted. Imagine how valuable it would be for a chain like Starbucks to know what websites their customers are looking at while in the store? I don't know if they do that, but it's multiple orders of magnitude more likely than a free wifi access point posing a security risk to end users.
No: there are exceptions apps can apply for.
> nobody is MITMing https
Kazakhstan is by forcing you to install their certificate to get online.
How about my company?
However that same security professional better be complaining about home/corporate WIFI.
Any security professional asserting this doesn't know whereof they speak. There are entire product categories of MITM devices ("TLS inspection") for sale. Another poster mentions nation states doing this openly.
Buy aside from many corporations and some nations states, nobody is doing this, full stop.
Maybe at one point in the future, purchase of theoretical MITM devices and deploying them in a dragnet of free wifi access points without the FBI finding out will be profitable. But for now, there's much cheaper and more profitable ways to make money criminally.
If everything needs to be qualified to the millionth degree, with every caveat laid out and explained, we won't have time to discuss interesting things. The OPs comment is correct general advice.
The OP may be sort-of correct for your average first-world facebook-phone user with "nothing to hide", so I kind of agree with your last sentence. But it is way too blithe and unconcerned, and, well, they won't be the first self-described "security expert" who's judgement I find lacking.
Now, nation states, which may be able to obtain valid PKI certificates for MITM purposes, are a whole other level of adversary. Still, again, anyone who can do that will probably not be deterred by you using a WPA-PSK2 protected Wi-Fi AP.
So, overall, I don't see what kind of increased security risk you would be exposing yourself to by using public wifi networks.
"Nobody can open this lock, full stop." "...well, except for nation states, and people who can touch it."
For nation states, they started to require the custom CA cert as well via legislation, see the recent Kazakhstan story.
Not true: https://tools.kali.org/information-gathering/sslstrip
Most free access points have a http endpoint that requires you to 'sign in' first, that is MITM'd and then sslstrip any outbound https requests from there.
SSLStrip also does not work for major social networks or financial institutions that implement HTTPS Strict Transfer Policy, which is basically all of them.
The only way you can use SSLStrip nowadays is if you have BofA/whatever phishing links on your wifi portal's home page, which is a pretty hard sell phishing wise.
And why is a password enough to encrypt that information, even if said password is written in large letters on a wall for everybody to see?
I'm sure that there are a good technical reasons, but at the same time it seems like there should be a better way to have convenient and safe WiFi networks in public spaces.
So, if a WiFi hotspot used something like TLS, the data would be encrypted, but you have to way to verify that you're not going through a malicious third party's hotspot on the way to the public WiFi.
> And why is a password enough to encrypt that information, even if said password is written in large letters on a wall for everybody to see?
I work on security, and I connect to open wifi networks all the time when I travel. I trust myself to not install random root certs and not ignorant to go past https warnings.
For my own apps, I have HSTS preloaded, proper CSP headers, and don't TLS < 1.2.
Is there a technical reason for not having access points that are secure/encrypted and open?
HTTPS is able to do protocol negotiation in the open, then provide a secure channel. Why is there no such thing at the WiFi link layer?!
I found some discussion at https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/35867/why-isnt-... and https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/149422/why-isnt... , with wildly varying answers.
Places of business ... Yeah I guess I do that, and really, I've no idea if that is actually that business's wi-fi.
Granted I run a VPN at nearly all times anyway.
The solution is to raise more public awareness of VPNs, and their benefits.
Also, automating the setup of self-hosted VPNs (like OpenVPN) on a home machine (like a Raspberry Pi plugged into the router) would go a long way. I personally prefer not to use third-party VPN providers, as I don't really know whether I can trust them.
The OPs point is, at some point in the chain you have to trust someone and in his opinion coffee shops are less likely to want to do bad things with your WiFi connection than VPN providers et al. Which I think is a fair point when you look at the costs of scale. ie it’s easier and cheaper to set up a rogue VPN provider or boobytrapped installer than it is a coffee shop.
Personally though, the reason I don’t connect to random WiFi networks is most of the ones in the UK ask you for your email address. I’d rather rag my mobile data allowance than hand my email address over to 3rd parties.
This is why I have a few spare email addresses that I don't log into. They have no personal information about me (most of these mailboxes were last accessed on computers I don't have anymore or via the public library).
That said, things may have improved in the last couple of years...
Trusting the link layer is an unnecessary band-aid. It doesn't need to be trusted, and you should always operate with the assumption that it's not trusted. Only trust end-to-end encryption and authentication.
Your second line steps toward security absolutism, since it just pushes out the trust boundary one step further and requires even more technical expertise to be actionable, especially in contrast to using a VPN provider.
The advice to only trust E2E encryption is only useful if you trust both the E2E service provider and the implementation, especially where the service provider owns the only compatible implementations, and the implementation is closed source.
The recent observations that FB could, either willfully, or under coercion, completely undermine their E2E implementation illustrates that, in general, solutions that are user friendly, readily accessible, and operating at scale, are subject to manipulation for economic, law enforcement, or political reasons.
Perhaps using a VPN prevents them from logging your IP address. But they still have your username that you logged in with, your phone's device ID, your session cookies (which were created when you were at home on WiFi), your browser's signature, etc. Again, using a VPN isn't going to stop any of that.
The likely outcome of using a VPN is that Facebook's analytics will know exactly who you are, but their global rate limiter will cut off your access because your IP address is now shared with a thousand other people, some of whom are using a VPN to spam them.
There is still the rest of the internet, like the part between Cloudflare terminating SSL, and the backend on shared hosting, running bare HTTP. Point being that if you're using sites that are lazy about transport security, no VPN will help you.
Paid for an unlimited 4G plan just to not have to use public WiFi anymore anywhere.
SSL != trust