Unfortunately nothing opt in ever gets wide adoption. So I expect to keep seeing these sort of infernal acts as people get bright but misguided ideas that require broad adoption to work. for example googles wifi cataloging does not work at all if to get cataloged you have to put "_cataloged" in your ssid.
Sharing your host's WiFi password with all your contacts should never get a wide adoption. It should never be an option anyway.
It shows Microsoft's astonishing ignorance of security.
If you have a contact, they are in their settings, and they're nearby and they can see your wifi network, a prompt will appear on your phone which asks if you would like to share wifi credentials with them.
There's some foolery going on to stop it popping up if you're using the device normally, like you have to be in settings or the home screen - or recently unlock your phone or something... But it's very explicitly: opt-in.
It's not opt-in for the owner of the network, who should really have a say in the matter.
I do use this feature from time to time, but it's typically on networks where either I'm the owner, or the owner's given me permission to share the creds.
This also opens up an attack surface (which I got to experience firsthand on a burner device at DEF CON 31), where someone spoofs an Apple device requesting network creds. The attack itself involves spamming share requests and catching you off guard, causing you to hit OK, or you just hit OK out of notification fatigue.
Why? It’s literally just a shortcut for asking for the password from someone who already has it and then having it read it out loud or texted. If the owner of the network doesn’t want that happening they need to explain that in either case.
It doesn’t, they have exactly as much agency as they would if the shortcut didn’t exist.
> As the person running the network, should you not have some degree of control over who gets to join your network, be it fully open, fully closed, or anywhere in between?
If you want more control than a shareable password provides, it’s on you to implement something other than a shareable password. A feature that merely helps people share passwords doesn’t change that.
How does this work? Isn't there any verification done through iCloud or something? I don't expect my phone to know about all my contacts' iphone identifiers.
I just tried this the other day with my cousin's wife whose phone number I don't have stored in my contacts and it didn't offer to share the wifi password until we both added each other's number.
Computers were opt in.
Too fucking bad for them. This opt-out bullshit for everything like this, marketing emails, etc. is bullshit. I’m sick of it.