I have a cellular internet card that I use in my MacBook Pro (thanks work!). If I wanted to (not sure about the terms of use), I could turn my laptop into a wireless access point. OSX makes this trivial to do. It is just:
System Preferences -> Sharing -> internet
I can name my Mac-as-Wifi-hotspot anything I want, like Linksys or TMobile Hotspot, or concourse, or hhonors, or any of the other plethora of common network names that frequent travelers may have accepted as a known network. My question is how many iPhones would hop on my network without their owners ever knowing (b/c who the hell would join “linksys” in the airport?). If those iPhones hopped on the network, would they begin check email at regular intervals, passing the password in clear text?
Granted, this is a problem with laptops as well, but I assume people whose laptops are checking email in the airport tend to know what network they are on. The iPhone seems like it could be particularly dangerous since I would imagine this could all take place in someone’s pocket without them ever knowing (from my very limited understanding).
Surely, if this was the case it would be a big story already. Can anyone confirm or deny this behavior? Should I test it at DFW this week? Or maybe I should test it at some of the biggest airports in the country over the next month. I think I will be at DFW, ORD, DCA, LGA, and SFO in that time.
Update: After reading an article on iPhones flooding Duke’s wireless network I think I have a pretty good guess at what is going on:
- The good news is that iPhones will not join an ‘evil twin’ network just because the network name is the same as one you trust.
- The way they are doing this is to retain the IP/MAC addresses of the WiFi access point with that name.
- When a known network name comes into range, the iPhone pings the “known” IP address of that network name to check the MAC address.
- That IP address may or may not exist on that network.
- The easy way to test this is see if an iPhone asks for you to approve each TMobile hotspot (or something similar) you go to.
Any further information (pro or con) would be of interest to my curiosity.
2 Comments
The other thing to note is that the kind of “network” you are creating with your Mac is an Ad-Hoc network. Any PC can do this too. It is meant for Box-to-Box connections to share files, etc. It is also limited to just a single connection at a time. The card in your Mac can’t connect to more than one wifi device at a time. So first, you’d only connect to one iPhone (even if you did trick it) and second, it wouldn’t be connected to the net anymore (unless you were using a wired connection) so the iPhone wouldn’t be able to even attempt to check its email.
Your typical wifi hotspot is an Infrastructure connection. This can form connections with any number of devices, etc. Only Access Points can pull-off this type of connection.
Interesting idea though. I am sure the security is pretty lax on those things, given Macs tendency to rely on safety-in-lack-of-numbers for security.
I understand it is an Ad-Hoc network. I assume when you say that the MBP Airport can only connect to one device at a time you mean that it cannot both connect to an access point and be an access point at the same time, however, when it is acting as an access point it is able to connect to multiple client connections. Right? So I would be able to connect to every iPhone that connected.
As for the iPhones not being connected, I guess I was not clear. I have a cellular card as well that I use to connect to the internet. This connection is shared when my MBP is acting as an access point.