Yesterday I posted a Google+ poll about what is and isn't safe on an unknown Wifi access point, and 93% of the 30 responses were wrong, in spite of the fact that many of the people who follow me are technical and even have a security bent. This did not surprise me.
The question was "You're connected to some random public Wifi hotspot. You know nothing about who owns it or why they make it public (the SSID says it's STARBUCKS and there is a nearby Starbucks, but who knows?), but it gives you a functional Internet connection. Which of the following is safe?"
The three possible answers and their response rates were:
- Logging onto your bank to transfer money (7%)
- Reading the news on CNN, or similar (27%)
- None of the above, unknown Wifi is risky (67%)
The right answer is "Logging onto your bank to transfer money". Congrats to the two voters who got it right.
(Note that the SSLLabs testing protocol is fairly harsh, which is good but perhaps a bit alarmist. If your bank gets a B or a C, scroll down in the report and take a look at the results of simulations with the browser you use. One of the banks I use (Chase) gets a B because it supports use of RC4. Now RC4 isn't actually insecure when used correctly, and TLS does use it correctly, but it's old and no longer recommended. However, my browser (Chrome 47), does not use RC4, so the site/browser combination is green, meaning secure. Some sites also get dinged for not supporting forward secrecy. That's a nice property, but not essential. Don't worry about it.)
So why were the others wrong?
The second option, reading CNN or similar, is wrong because almost no news sites use TLS at all. They're all unencrypted and unauthenticated. This makes them risky all the time, because any attacker anywhere in the chain of routers and servers between you and the origin site can alter the data you receive from them, injecting malware to exploit your browser, tracking cookies (from any origin), drive-by downloads, etc. An attacker can also extract authentication cookies from your browser, for any non-TLS sites you use even without any browser vulnerabilities. But non-TLS sites are particularly risky when you're connected to a random Wifi AP because that is an ideal way for someone to mount these sorts of attacks.
The third option, "just say no", is one I have some sympathy for. And, as the comments on my original post pointed out, it actually may be a correct answer depending on how you interpret "safe". TLS doesn't protect the Wifi operator from seeing what sites you visit, for example, and that list can say a lot about you even if none of your actual information is revealed and even if the data sent to your browser can't be manipulated in dangerous ways. However, if being tracked online is your major concern, you probably just shouldn't use the web at all, unfortunately, so I'm going to discard that definition of "safe". Under a more common interpretation which is that your traffic can't be snooped or your computer (or mobile device) harmed by what you receive, this option is wrong because connecting to your bank, with an up-to-date browser and assuming decent configuration on the bank side, *is* safe, and the "just say no" stance would unnecessarily restrict you.
Others in the comments tried to add additional options to the poll, suggesting that it was safe to use a VPN to a trusted gateway. This is true, but HTTP sites are still inherently less secure than HTTPS sites. Use of the VPN removes the possibly-unscrupulous Wifi operator from the equation, but an attacker who manages to get between the VPN server and CNN can still do anything. Security really needs to be end-to-end.
An interesting point related to VPNs is that Google's security team is eliminating their use for Google employees. Google used to deploy VPN software on almost all portable corporate devices so that employees could securely connect to company systems while traveling, or from home. A couple of years ago they recognized that this was an unnecessary complication and instead they've worked to expose all of the internal systems directly on the Internet, but accessible only via HTTPS (and with tight TLS configurations). Client certificates are issued to corporate devices, and the TLS configuration is set to reject any connection that doesn't have a valid certificate. Actually "exposed" isn't quite the right word, because what's really directly connected to the Internet is a reverse proxy which does the TLS and also implements user authentication (after the connection is established and client cert is verified) using user password and two-factor authentication. The 2FA used in most cases is cryptographic, not a password, from a hardware token (a "security key"). The actual systems receive information from the proxy about what user connected, and don't need to handle any of the TLS or authentication themselves. It's quite elegant, very secure, all standards-based, and doesn't require VPN software, just a modern web browser. Also, _exactly_ the same technology is used for connections coming from inside the corporate network. There's no need to distinguish between "outside" and "inside"; just secure it all.
By the way, I sometimes run into people who don't believe that everything on the web should be encrypted, because lots of stuff just isn't that important. They're wrong. We really need to encrypt and authenticate all Internet traffic.
