I feel like the OP you’re responding to. Explain how I should be comfortable? The idea creeps me out, but I admit I haven’t delved into security for a few years.
You don’t have to trust them any more than you trust your local Starbucks WiFi. We’re at the point where your traffic should no longer be vulnerable just because you’re on the wrong WiFi network.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You don’t HAVE to be comfortable. But if you use any sort of public WiFi, this is no riskier than any of those networks. They can grab some metadata unless you use a VPN, but likely less than what your ISP already has on you anyway. Basically, there’s no reason this should be putting up any major red flags. We’re past the days when a malicious access point could MitM most connections due to lack of encryption.
neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Every site uses HTTPS which encrypts your data in transit. Even if they sniff the packets, they would spend literal decades trying to decrypt it.
Just be wary of visiting sites or sending traffic not over HTTPS. Its rare, but it does happen.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
HTTPS does not protect against everything. there’s many other protocols that apps can use for whatever use case, and even HTTPS traffic leaks lots of information directly or indirectly, like the websites you visit (because of DNS, and TLS SNI)
Ontimp@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
What the others said. If you want a practical example of this working, have a look at eduroam. It’s the joint WiFi of all European universities and I cannot recall that there ever were any privacy issues.
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Been that way since https became common
hisao@ani.social 2 weeks ago
How do we know intelligence agencies are not in collusion with certificate authorities though? What if they actually have access to ROOT CA private keys and can just automatically strip https from most of the traffic in their mass surveillance software? This is something I found with a very quick search: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Yeah sure but defending against nation state intelligence agencies is a thread model few people have. It’s also not really realistic unless you go to paranoia level mitigations.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
You don’t have to trust them any more than you trust your local Starbucks WiFi
I don’t really trust that either
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
That’s the point, you don’t have to. The system works on the assumption that the AP is untrusted.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
except when not. HTTPS helps with security, but there’s privacy leaks all around all kinds of network traffic. apps and services you use, websites you visit (DNS, SNI), when do you do something, like arrive or receive a voip call, …
8fingerlouie@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
My traffic is not vulnerable, but my device might be.
When you connect to public WiFi, you also share it with others, and maybe someone on that network wants to test out their new hacker skills ?
Maybe not as much of a problem for phones, but that juicy developer laptop running unauthenticated MongoDB with a dump of the production database… yup, that now “mine”.
Ideally all those services should be listening on 127.0.0.1 / ::1, but everybody makes mistakes. Maybe the service comes preconfigured to listen on 0.0.0.0.
Honytawk@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Just keep your firewall set to public network and you will most likely be fine.
8fingerlouie@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Again, people make mistakes, so they may think the firewall is on, but that one time 3 weeks ago when they were debugging something and they turned off the firewall for it, yeah, we never got around to enabling it again.
Also, my home network is a lot more secure by default than shared public WiFi. At home I have decent control over who and what connects. Sure, people could in theory crack my WiFi password, but the risk of that is low compared to sitting on public WiFi.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Nothing we can do to prevent that, unless we want to turn all laptops into walled gardens. PEBKAC is not the fault of the WiFi network.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Someone runs MongoDB unauthenticated, bound on 0.0.0.0 with production data, on a computer without a VPN, and the problem is the WiFi?
Like I get what you are saying, but this sounds like saying that we should ban speedbumps because imagine there is a guy with a loaded gun pointed at a kid with no safe, finger on the trigger, and high on coke, if the car hits the speedbump the toddler is gone. Yeah, but I would hardly say the speedump is the same.