Innovation Labs | 007 Software

Windows 10 is here and it has unleashed a wave of new features and tools for its users. One of which is Wi-Fi Sense, a multi-purpose feature designed to make connecting to the Internet a breeze from Windows Phones.

As explained on the Windows Phone feature page, it does this by:

Automatically connecting you to crowdsourced open Wi-Fi networks it knows about.
Accepting a Wi-Fi network’s terms of use on your behalf and providing additional info for you to networks that require it.
Letting you exchange password-protected Wi-Fi network access with your contacts to give and get Internet access without seeing each other’s Wi-Fi network passwords.

While these are potentially convenient features to use, I have security and privacy concerns regarding their implementation.

It goes without saying, that automatically connecting to open Wi-Fi networks is a bad idea. As we’ve explained several times before, not all free or open Wi-Fi networks are secure and others can be deliberately malicious. Accessing the Internet on these hotspots can lead to your traffic being intercepted by an attacker, known as a ‘man in the middle’ attack.

Accepting a Wi-Fi network’s terms of use automatically on your behalf seems like an equally bad idea to me. Before we even consider what terms Wi-Fi sense may be agreeing to on your behalf, we don’t even know if the landing page is legitimate or encrypted.

As a human, being prompted for an email address or other personal details gives us a chance to assess the trustworthiness of a provider and make a judgement. Wi-Fi Sense takes this decision making away and will seemingly hand over your information to any network asking for it. This could be a privacy concern.

The last feature, sharing Wi-Fi passwords with your contacts is a little less concerning but it is dependent on complete trust within your contacts.

In combination with the other two features, receiving a network key from a contact could cause you to automatically connect to a malicious network and potentially put you at risk.

How to disable Wi-Fi Sense

Disabling Wi-Fi Sense is simple. On your Windows 10 device go to Settings > Wi-Fi > Wi-Fi Sense.

Tips for safe Wi-Fi Usage

When it comes to surfing the web from your phone, there are generally two things that should concern you:

Wi-Fi-Hacking: Wi-Fi hacking is the most common threat when it comes to public Wi-Fi. When you connect to an public Wi-Fi network (i.e. coffee shop, airport, or hotel), others maybe able to intercept your Internet traffic, collecting your passwords, private photos, emails, browser cookies and a lot more personal info.

Wi-Fi tracking is the second big issue. Currently specialized software solutions allow virtually anybody to use your phone’s Wi-Fi signal, to track your location and in some instances identify you. Wi-Fi tracking is even more worrying as most smartphone users have their Wi-Fi on all the time. This is increasingly an issue as retailers can use your Wi-Fi signal to track how you move around stores or around the city and even identify who you are. And that’s not all, if you keep your Wi-Fi open all the time hackers can trick your phone into connecting to a fake Wi-Fi hotspot.

At the AVG Innovation Lab in Amsterdam, we developed AVG Wi-Fi Assistant to help combat both of these problems.

VPN Technology

AVG Wi-Fi Assistant can encrypt all the data coming and going from your device helping to ensure that even if someone is snooping on your traffic, that your data is still secured.

Wi-Fi Automation

To help prevent the Wi-Fi tracking issue detailed above, AVG Wi-Fi Assistant prevents your device from automatically joining public Wi-Fi networks by turning off your Wi-Fi when you’re not using it. This helps to keep you safe from trackers.

Here is Tony Anscombe with more tips on securing your Wi-Fi connection from an Android device.

Video

How to keep your mobile while using public Wi-Fi

AVG is always looking for ways to help people protect and secure their online identities and this year at Pepcom in Barcelona, we’re excited to reveal a pair of invisibility glasses.

What are invisibility glasses?

Developed by AVG Innovation Labs, the glasses help protect your visual identity in the digital age.

Through a mixture of technology and specialist materials, privacy wearables such as invisibility glasses can make it difficult for cameras or other facial recognition technologies to get a clear view of your identity.

Why would they be useful?

There are a number of reasons why invisibility glasses could be a valuable privacy tool in the future:

The increasing use of smartphone cameras in public places means it’s more likely unsolicited images taken of us may end up online.
Big Data projects such as Google’s StreetView highlight the possibility for our faces and identities to appear in the public domain.
Advancements in facial-recognition technologies, such as Facebook’s DeepFace, could soon give a private corporations power to not only recognize us, but also cross-reference our faces to other data found online.

How do they work?

While the technology behind invisibility glasses is still in the prototype phase, there are generally two different methods of combatting unwanted facial recognition:

Infrared Light

The use of infrared light to break facial detection software was first introduced Isao Echizen of Tokyo Nation Institute of Informatics.

The idea is to place infrared LEDs inserted around the eyes and the nose areas. Since the infrared lights are completely invisible to human eyes, they are only detectable by cameras which are sensitive to the wavelengths of these LEDs. They claim to break face detection when the lights are on.

In this example we show how infrared can be used to avoid Facebook’s facial recognition technology.

One drawback of this approach is that many cellphone camera sensors have an infrared filter strong enough to cut off any wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum.

Retro-reflective Materials
These specialist materials help maintain your privacy at the moment that the image is actually taken.

Image courtesy of 3m

While most surfaces reflect light by diffusing or scattering it in all directions, retro-reflective materials are specially designed to reflect light back at the same angle as it arrived.

If caught in flash photography, retro-reflective materials will send most of the light back to the sensor. This will result in an image that will put the Dynamic Range of the camera sensor to test.

A noticeable drawback of this approach is that it only works with flash photography as otherwise, not enough light will be sent back to distort the camera sensor. Secondly, a camera with higher dynamic range can be used to minimize the darkening of the subject.

When can I get my own invisibility glasses?

At this stage, invisibility glasses, including those we will be displaying at Pepcom are just a proof of concept .

Rather than designing a product for market release, tech experts are investigating how technology can adapt to combat the daily erosion of our privacy in the digital age. Don’t expect to see them for sale any time soon!

Come and see us

If you are visiting Pepcom in Barcelona next week, please come and talk to the AVG team, we’d love to meet you and give you a demonstration of our invisibility glasses!

007 Software

Tag Archives: Innovation Labs

Windows 10 Wi-Fi Sense could be a privacy problem