How to remain safe on the road
Linked by Igor Ljubuncic on Mon 2nd Apr 2012 15:41 UTC
Features, Office You have just bought tickets to an exotic vacation spot. You board the flight, you land safely, you pull your netbook from your backpack, fire it up, and then check if there are any available Wireless networks. Indeed there are, unencrypted, passwordless, waiting for you. So you connect to the most convenient hotspot and start surfing. Being addicted as you are, you want to login into your email or social network just to check if something cardinal happened in the world during your four-hour flight. You're about to hit the sign in button. Stop. What you're about to do might not be safe.
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RE: Firefox and Chrome
by rhavenn on Tue 3rd Apr 2012 00:05 UTC in reply to "Firefox and Chrome"
rhavenn
Member since:
2006-05-12

Do you actually look at the certs given to your HTTPS connections? In a "hostile" environment trusting HTTPS to be secure isn't much better and often gives a false sense of security. It's pretty trivial to just proxy any HTTPS traffic for a user and unless you actually look at the cert you'll never know. I will admit that if your data stream between you and siteA is legit that people in between can't sniff it, but if you're starting out in a hostile area it can't be trusted.

The only way to be secure in a hostile environment is a key based structure (SSH, VPN, etc..) where you already know the key on the other end. ie: you SSH to your home box and get a prompt for a new key, that you know you've been to before, one would be a fool to continue.

A bootable CD distro and a USB key with your various keys (SSH, VPN, etc...) pre-setup is a good way to go.

I'm not saying this isn't a pain in the ass, but unfortunately real security normally is these days.

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