On Wed, 25 Feb 2009, Ted Kubaska wrote: > I find myself spending a bunch of time in coffee houses with wifi. I'm > curious about the security. Most of the time I don't care. If someone > wants to read my email, they're welcome to it. But what about a credit > card purchase? I have not done it, but what if I bought something over > the Internet using my credit card and the wifi at Bella Espresso or > Jax? Would I be foolish to do that?
You'd hope that a credit card purchase would be encrypted end-to-end via SSL. Still, it's difficult to know for sure that any given public wifi network hasn't had DNS spoofed -- pointing to rogue servers that can launch man-in-the-middle attacks, for instance. OpenVPN has a coffee-shop mode that can tunnel *all* of your traffic back through your home network (assuming it's accessible via the Internet). DNS, mail, web -- everything travels encrypted between your laptop and home VPN server before being routed to its final destination. -- Paul Heinlein <> [email protected] <> http://www.madboa.com/ _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
