With the spread of recent COVID-19, it is especially essential to minimize any privacy and security risks for individuals, protecting their civil liberties. In the era of smartphone devices, user privacy has become increasingly important, and many papers discuss this problem within the context of Wi-Fi-enabled devices. Numerous companies, institutions, universities, and education centers utilize WPA2-Enterprise networks, where wireless devices establish a secure connection to a Wi-Fi network following the IEEE 802.1X standard based on port-isolation functionality. These protocols range from open Wi-Fi networks-hotspots to WPA or WPA2 protocols with keys shared between the device and the access point (AP). Nowadays, a large number of protocols are used to establish an Internet connection via a Wi-Fi network. As a result, the attacker is granted with user credentials and IMSI number and provided with access to all Eduroam-related services. Additionally, we showcase the psychological aspects of secure Eduroam users, where some are willing to modify secure configuration profiles to gain aspects to certain blocked features. Indeed, the analysis of the configuration profiles has been confirmed by performing the deanonymization attack on a large-scale international music festival in our country, where 70% of the devices have been vulnerable.
#Wpa2 enterprise vs personal mac#
Furthermore, by analyzing the Eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool of 1066 different institutions around the world, 67% of exported Eduroam profiles having the Wi-Fi device reveal the user’s identity in the clear, thus linking the users with the device’s MAC address. More than 87% of 1650 devices collected during a two-month test on our university are vulnerable to MAC address deanonymization attack. We show that device deanonymization is a concerning liability of many Eduroam networks. Considering the widespread use of Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones and rising concerns regarding users’ privacy, we focus on the privacy aspects of WPA2-Enterprise vulnerabilities mainly on the widespread Eduroam network. However, a known evil twin attack can be performed to steal users’ Wi-Fi login credentials, if the devices are not configured correctly.
#Wpa2 enterprise vs personal password#
When both the provider’s and the end-user’s devices are configured properly, it is considered one of the safest Wi-Fi connection protocols with the added benefits of having a unique password for every Wi-Fi user. A plethora of organizations, companies, and foremost universities and educational institutions are using WPA2-Enterprise protocol to allow their end-users to connect to provided Wi-Fi networks.