Much more importantly, never use public wifi for anything except to establish an ssh tunnel to your home computer, and make sure that your email account has SSL on for both sending and receiving email.

Here’s a shell script that I use on my JB iPhone. Install in /var/mobile/bin/ssht, then run from Terminal (you can program a quick action for this as well for convenience). At home, I have Squid and Privoxy proxies chained with access only from localhost; you can use any of Squid/Polipo/Privoxy options for this purpose, all available using “sudo port install squid privoxy polipo” from MacPorts, or equivalent using yum/etc. on Linux.

With a setup like this, the only information the public wifi router (and all its clients) will see is encrypted SSL and ssh traffic.

#!/bin/sh
# SSH tunnel to squid proxy: ssht [user_name@][ip_address][:ssh_port]

MYUSERNAME_DEFAULT=username
MYHOSTNAME_DEFAULT=192.168.1.1 # actual IP goes here
MYSSHPORT_DEFAULT=22 # move ssh off standard port 22!

# SSH port forwarding specs, e.g. 8080:localhost:3128
MYLOCALHOSTPORT=8080
MYSQUIDPORT=3128

# Get username, hostname, and ssh_port from the command line argument
if [[ $1 == *@* ]]
then
MYUSERNAME=${1%%@*}
else
MYUSERNAME=$MYUSERNAME_DEFAULT
fi
if [ -z $MYUSERNAME ]
then
MYUSERNAME=$MYUSERNAME_DEFAULT
fi

if [[ $1 == *:* ]]
then
MYSSHPORT=${1##*:}
else
MYSSHPORT=$MYSSHPORT_DEFAULT
fi
if [ -z $MYSSHPORT ]
then
MYSSHPORT=$MYSSHPORT_DEFAULT
fi

MYHOSTNAME=${1##*@}
MYHOSTNAME=${MYHOSTNAME%%:*}
if [ -z $MYHOSTNAME ]
then
MYHOSTNAME=$MYHOSTNAME_DEFAULT
fi

ssh -p $MYSSHPORT -L $MYLOCALHOSTPORT:localhost:$MYSQUIDPORT -l $MYUSERNAME $MYHOSTNAME -f -C -q -N \
&& echo “SSH tunnel established via $MYLOCALHOSTPORT:localhost:$MYSQUIDPORT\n\tto $MYUSERNAME@$MYHOSTNAME:$MYSSHPORT.” \
|| echo “SSH tunnel FAIL.”

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It has been some hackers dream to have the ability to steal information just by walking near people with a smart phone.

As the usage of smart phones and similar devices that transmit info over wi-fi rises this hacker dream is coming closer. This threat can come in many forms it havent been created yet but it could be phone exploiting all the phones in a circle around it or just stealing stored passwords or something else…

Not unlike security on a PC, most Iphone owners dont care about security, bringing up any security subject as discussion topic will likely blow away most people they dont even want to hear about this boring crap.

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There are also some nifty routers that will serve as endpoints for multiple wireless networks. The basic idea is that you can leave an unsecured network with less privileges as a sort of honeypot for your neighbors so that they won’t bother trying your phone number for the password to your real network….

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