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Posted by wylbur37 on September 10, 2007, 12:23 pm
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When using the Internet via WiFi at a public place such as a library
or cafe, it is conceivable that the people running the router
could be capturing all of your transmissions and therefore
could be recording your name, account numbers, etc.
Are there ways to prevent or minimize this hazard?
For example, would it help to use something like Torpark?
What would you recommend?
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Posted by R. McCarty on September 10, 2007, 12:34 pm
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Just make sure you only send sensitive data when the "Lock" symbol
is closed ( If using IE ) which denotes an encrypted transmission using
https.
> When using the Internet via WiFi at a public place such as a library
> or cafe, it is conceivable that the people running the router
> could be capturing all of your transmissions and therefore
> could be recording your name, account numbers, etc.
>
> Are there ways to prevent or minimize this hazard?
>
> For example, would it help to use something like Torpark?
>
> What would you recommend?
>
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Posted by Tom Porterfield on September 10, 2007, 12:34 pm
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> When using the Internet via WiFi at a public place such as a library
> or cafe, it is conceivable that the people running the router
> could be capturing all of your transmissions and therefore
> could be recording your name, account numbers, etc.
>
> Are there ways to prevent or minimize this hazard?
>
> For example, would it help to use something like Torpark?
>
> What would you recommend?
My first recommendation is to not use public WiFi networks to send
personally identifiable data.
If you do plan on sending private or personal information from a public
WiFi then make sure you are using a secure protocol such as SSL or
other. This will insure the data is properly encrypted and only
readable on the server holding the certificate.
--
Tom Porterfield
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Posted by me on September 10, 2007, 12:44 pm
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Posted by Mark Shroyer on September 10, 2007, 2:58 pm
If you were Registered and logged in, you could reply and use other advanced thread options > Tunnel your traffic through a secure SOCKS server.
Using an encrypted SOCKS proxy is a good solution for securing
individual applications, but it has some limitations. In
particular: When using SOCKS to protect Web traffic, your HTTP
requests and responses themselves will be encrypted as per your web
browser's proxy configuration, but DNS requests generally will not.
So while nobody on the wireless LAN would be able to directly see
the pages you're looking at, they could easily tell precisely which
Web servers you visit unless you take extra care to ensure that the
browser bypasses the system DNS resolver, querying the SOCKS server
instead (e.g., the network.proxy.socks_remote_dns setting in
Firefox).
Torpark, now known as xB Browser, also provides HTTP traffic
encryption (over the Tor network, which itself uses a SOCKS
interface). I'd imagine that it goes the extra step in tunneling
DNS traffic by default, but I can't speak from personal experience.
For my part I protect my privacy on untrusted networks with OpenVPN.
I have a couple OpenVPN instances on my home network's gateway, one
of which is configured to push a local default route and DNS server
to clients. So when I connect my laptop to this VPN (using Angelo
Laub's excellent Tunnelblick front-end for OS X), none of my Web,
DNS, IM, or email traffic is legible to anybody on the wireless LAN.
And as an added benefit, I get access to all the file shares and
other services behind the NAT on my home network.
If you have a spare old PC lying around and a reasonable amount of
experience with Unix systems, I highly recommend setting up an
OpenBSD home router with OpenVPN. Not only do you get a secure
firewall and VPN solution, but once you have a full-fledged BSD
server as your network gateway you'll discover no end of handy uses
for the machine, which simply would not have been possible with a
Linksys or Netgear from Best Buy.
If you're interested in running your own VPN, I'd be happy to email
you the self-reference system configuration manual that I wrote
while installing my OpenBSD / OpenVPN gateway. (I'm planning to put
it up on my web page eventually, but I haven't yet had the chance to
proofread it for spelling and technical errors.) It might sound
intimidating, but OpenVPN is in fact fantastically simple to set up
if you have any Unix or Linux experience whatsoever.
References:
http://openvpn.net/
http://www.tunnelblick.net/
http://www.openbsd.org/
--
Mark Shroyer
http://markshroyer.com/
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