As a Wi-Fi evangelist it is with some trepidation that I approach this issue – because I really want Wi-Fi everywhere, for everyone, and I don’t want people to be scared of using it. But Wi-Fi security is (unfortunately) a real issue. As someone said: If Dilbert is picking up on this, it’s probably about time to take it seriously. Let’s try not to be Elbonians, shall we 🙂
So here’s my ten cents worth: Wi-Fi security solutions exist and work extremely well. It’s just that a lot of venues don’t bother applying them – and that’s gotta change at some point and preferably soon. AirTight Networks estimates that losing 1,000 data records to hackers can cost between $50 and $90,000.
And Wi-Fi appears to be somewhat of a blue ocean for cybercrooks. This blog post shows some of the methods that hackers will use. So if the money part doesn’t scare you, losing your passwords & personal data like this should.
Ok, so enough scaremongering. Here’s what the industry is doing:
Hotspot 2.0 / Passpoint is (as far as I know) the sure-fire way of resolving the Wi-Fi security issue because it encrypts and authenticates access even according to 3GPP-approved standards. Both ‘trusted’ and ‘untrusted’ (IPSec) 3GPP methods are in theory as secure as mobile services. But you must implement everything – including encryption, EAP-SIM/EAP-TTLS authentication, etc. – and not everyone does that (often because encryption chews up some of the Wi-Fi capacity).
MAC-address authentication is used in a lot of places, but MAC addresses can fairly easily be spoofed. And you don’t want that to happen, folks. A VPN or https-approach to Wi-Fi security is also possible (for example with Private Wi-Fi or AnchorFree) but this could also leave some holes in the fabric – read more about it in this blog. If you have comments to this view, please post them!
Carriers and other service providers are in a great position to make sure that public access Wi-Fi is secure (through public or managed service Wi-Fi) and consistent across a big footprint. Venue-owners still have some work to do in this area and I really hope they will start thinking about it. Because we want Wi-Fi everywhere and we want happy & safe consumers using it.
To get to the bottom of the Wi-Fi security story, we’ve dedicated an ENTIRE DAY of the upcoming Wi-Fi NOW conference to this. Wi-Fi NOW is happening on November 17-19 in the great city of Amsterdam – go to this link to check out the program. We need to make Wi-Fi safe & secure now because Wi-Fi the future of mass-market wireless connectivity. Join us!
