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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

The only clarification I'd make here is the distinction between "public wifi" and "unencrypted wifi". Some cafes I frequent have WPA2 secured networks with the SSID and password made freely available. I'm pretty sure that solves the Firesheep problem (I don't know for sure, but I'm reasonably confident that other people on the WPA2 network still can read my connection).

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I'm pretty sure that solves the Firesheep problem

With most WiFi encryption (basically except WPA2 Enterprise, which won't be in use in cafés) you can still receive the traffic as long as you see the initial handshake for the device connecting to the network. Sniffing software like Wireshark or Aircrack-NG can handle the decryption transparently.

Once you can see the traffic Firesheep or something like it will work in the same way as on an unencrypted network.

That's a bit of an "it depends" situation though. There's a good answer on Super User about this: http://superuser.com/a/156969/4682

You could still probably do a MITM attack using ARP poisoning or something of the like (IE redirect all traffic through one machine), if there is the ability to access other machines on the network.

If this is a WPA2 shared-password setup then your traffic can be captured, dumped and decrypted with aircrack-ng. Firesheep may not work, but it's trivial to present cookies which match captured values.

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