Travelling and wifi security ?
Travelling here and there and most places have free wifi. They give out a username and pwd. When at home I'm behind a router/firewall (NAT), but when using other peoples wifi, is there some extra security I can run for the wifi connection ?
ufw is currently active.
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
What do you want to do while traveling? Basic browsing & webmail or more? If you have a wifi adapter that's 'plug & play', you could use a live install on a flash drive. When you get home, nuke and reimage the flash drive. Any nasties picked up along the way should disappear. Another option would be to create or clone a separate partition on your hard drive. Same deal - use the temporary partition while connecting to untrusted networks and nuke it when you get home. Enabling the firewall included in most distros is painless but I'm not sure it's as effective as an isolated partition.
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
Basically browsing and web mail. But I may have to do internet banking or login to a cpanel side of a website. All these are "https" connection.
The wifi is built in to the laptop. I do have an external hard drive with me, so did wonder if there was an easy way to ..
* No internet traffic at all to hard drive
* allow internet traffic to the external. (then as you say, wipe the external when I get home).
I have GUFW running, enabled, full logging, incoming deny, outgoing allow.
Thanks :)
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
Thread moved to the "Security" forum as requested.
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
howefield
Thread moved to the "Security" forum as requested.
Thanks :)
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
Why not use a VPN service or set up your own ssh server to tunnel to for Internet access while away? VPN is my go to, but if at all possible I avoid public wi-fi. I'd rather use my iPad Air and VPN over the cellular network than public wi-fi on a 'real machine'. Too many ways to get past my VPN if you're an advanced hacker and my machine is up too long.
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
I travel a lot and use a VPN service for many years now.
So far, so good.
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
"But I may have to do internet banking or login to a cpanel side of a website. All these are "https" connection."
If it were me, I'd pay for a VPN provider or set one up myself for those functions. There have been enough https/TLS issues that I wouldn't trust only that on a public wifi connection. I try to avoid logging onto sensitive sites from public internet connections and have been successful so far. I don't worry much about web browsing and email.
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
oygle
Basically browsing and web mail. But I may have to do internet banking or login to a cpanel side of a website. All these are "https" connection.
Our wireless devices, by default, constantly try to connect to the last networks they were on. To accomplish this they actively scan their neighborhood by sending out probe requests. Your computer says "I'm looking for AT&T Wifi." A bad guy can easily intercept these requests and respond "I'm AT&T Wifi." Your computer will join and it will look like normal internet traffic to you. But a bad guy will actually be seeing everything you're doing, and probably stripping ssl so that https connections are not encrypted anymore.
The way to protect yourself is to use a VPN like everyone said and make sure you're connecting to a legitimate wifi. Don't automatically join networks and occasionally delete old networks.
Re: Travelling and wifi security ?
Tor is useful when you are in strange places.
BTW, the computers do not send scan messages looking for WiFi hot spots. The WiFi hot spots broadcast their SSID every so often - that is what your computer picks up. However, anyone can pretend to be anyone else and it is very easy to set up fake hot spots.