No protection against "evil twin" (same-named) wi-fi networks

[Antti Kaijanmäki]

Currently the indicator only shows whether or not a wireless network is secured, by showing a padlock.

In a situation where we have two accesspoints which both have the same ESSID (name) but different encryption (e.g. WEP vs. WPA) they provide two separate networks. Now the indicator shows two identical items and the user has no way of figuring out which is which.

Above scenario is a very rare one, but still completely valid.
Neither nm-applet or macosx networking menu bother to deal with this situation, they just show two identical networks, but Android is always showing the encryption scheme beneath the network name.

We can either
A) do nothing
B) always have the encryption type visible somehow
C) be smart about it and only show the encryption type when we detect that the name and padlock is not enough

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

My first instinct is just to use "{network name} ({encryption type})" whenever there's more than one network with the same name.

I wonder if we can do anything here to protect against social engineering attacks. I could camp outside a company office and set up a network with the same name but different encryption method. A device connecting automatically to the previous network would be safe. But a new employee, told to connect to "Yoyodyne" and confronted with a choice between "Yoyodyne (WPA2)" and "Yoyodyne (LEAP)", could easily try the wrong one -- and now I've captured the password to the company's real network. Has this problem been dealt with before?

[Tony Espy (awe)]

I took the liberties to change the Importance to Wishlist as it's really a new feature request.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

It turns out that the attack I described is called the "evil twin". <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_twin_%28wireless_networks%29>

Antti, if you don't mind, I'll retarget this bug report towards thwarting that attack. Showing the encryption type would not be a complete solution to disambiguating identically-named networks, whether they were coincidental or malicious.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

See also bug 1258496, asking for the opposite: showing multiple networks with the same name as a single item even if they offer different authentication methods.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

From JkB in <https://code.launchpad.net/~joergberroth/ubuntu-system-settings/wifi-802-1x-configurations/+merge/261920>: "To my understanding, the advantage of WPA Enterprise networks is that you can be sure to connect to the right access point, if it carries a valid certificate (or let's say it's way harder to build an "evil twin"
as you don't own the cert). For example, the University of Bergen works with certificates, <https://eduroam.no/connect/?institution=535;profile=1751;os=linux> but not as a must have. <https://it.uib.no/en/Eduroam_for_Linux> There seems to be an older auth scheme as well."