You should never be using a site without SSL if you're passing authentication information.
Now, while I understand this is out of an end user's control, that shouldn't cause us to throw the idea of a shared wireless network out the door. That should cause us to look at non-secure sites accepting credentials, and how to prevent that behavior in the first place.
Installing a browser add-on doesn't make websites lacking an SSL certificate magically acquire one. The fact is that there are still a lot of sites out there that don't have them.
You use a VPN to tunnel to a trusted server and have it initiate the cleartext connection to the site, keeping the traffic between you and that server encrypted.
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I've configured my Nexus 5 to auto-connect to any open "linksys" SSID. How would this be any different?
Don't rely on SSID for security. Rely on SSL/TLS and certificate pinning.
It's not different. It's not even necessarily bad. It's just worth considering while evaluating this proposal.
And what if you need to login to a site that isn't SSL-secured? There's nothing the end user (you) can do about that.
You should never be using a site without SSL if you're passing authentication information.
Now, while I understand this is out of an end user's control, that shouldn't cause us to throw the idea of a shared wireless network out the door. That should cause us to look at non-secure sites accepting credentials, and how to prevent that behavior in the first place.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
this site helps with this issue forcing sslany.
Installing a browser add-on doesn't make websites lacking an SSL certificate magically acquire one. The fact is that there are still a lot of sites out there that don't have them.
You use a VPN to tunnel to a trusted server and have it initiate the cleartext connection to the site, keeping the traffic between you and that server encrypted.
Not easy as in everyone has access to a __trusted__ VPN tunnel server.