Warn the user when connecting to an open AP which has been connected before as encrypted

[Antti Kaijanmäki]

scenario:

Bob works at an office which provides encrypted wireless for the employees to securely connect to the company network. Somebody outside the office sets up an access point with the same SSID but without encryption hoping that somebody from the company connects to it. Bob does not notice that the AP he sees in his indicator is in fact not encrypted and connects to the open AP thinking he is connected to the company secure AP and now all his sensitive traffic is exposed to the attacker.

[Antti Kaijanmäki (kaijanmaki)]

putting this to wishlist for now. I don't think nm-applet nor Windows implement this kind of a warning, but it would be relatively easy to implement.

Benefits:
A) would offer a minimal protection against this simple AP attack
B) would help to detect if somebody in the office has set up a tethering AP by accident (this happens more often you think)

[Pete Woods (pete-woods)]

Windows Vista and above identifies the hardware identity of access points (presumably by BSSID), and associates this information with each defined connection. Therefore if you try to connect to a different AP with the same SSID, it treats this as a separate "connection".

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This looks very similar to bug 1258496.