Google Storing WLAN Passwords In the Clear 242
First time accepted submitter husemann writes "Micah Lee from the EFF filed a bug report about Google storing all your WLAN passwords on their application settings backup service without allowing you to encrypt them. So far it's not known whether the passwords are stored encrypted at rest, but just the fact that Google can read them (and disclose them if forced by 'law') is a bit surprising, too put it nicely. Already one German university is concerned enough about this 'feature' that they issued a warning to their users."
Too much trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too much trust (Score:5, Funny)
you're wrong, they have time and time assured that the data doesn't go DIRECTLY to NSA. it goes through their servers, see, and they get to bill for it.
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Correct. Meter the tap. That's why we have lobbies, my boy!
Now, what is this item? "Central Services".... [youtube.com]
"Have you got a 27B / 6 ?"
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They care DEEPLY.
They are made rich, by doing so.
Re:Too much trust (Score:4, Interesting)
And if there is one thing that history has taught us, it's that if they're giving your passwords to the government, then they're also selling it to the highest bidder.
I thought about that with the Edward Snowden/Booz Allen stuff. Now Booz Allen is a firm that, besides the government, has a lot of private clients that hire them to do the data upskirting. If they're collecting stuff for the NSA, how much are you prepared to trust that none of that stuff is also going to their private clients. I know if I was some evil company looking for your personal data, and Booz Allen was my consultant, I'd be expecting a little "benefit" from their relationship to the NSA, know what I mean?
The ugliest part of the corporate/government intrusion into our personal lives and information is the fact that so much of it is being privatized to companies who also work for other companies and maybe other individuals who all have their own reasons for wanting your shit.
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The real scandal will occur when the government refuses to pay their bills. Nothing gets the overlords madder than a failure to pay.
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World was created five seconds AFTER this post. Writing it is false memory - implanted at moment that the physical universe WILL BE instantiated.
I think I think, therefore I think I am. ;-)
Re:Too much trust (Score:4, Interesting)
Google isn't the problem. The American government is. Which means if you want to be safe, stay away from USA and don't trust any companies based there.
If you happen to live there already, maybe it is about time you let the government know, you are not satisfied with their work.
Re:Too much trust (Score:5, Informative)
Not trusting any American companies with your data is of course prudent, in light of PRISM, however this doesn't mean your data is safe anywhere else either: if it's in France, Germany, or UK, they all have spying programs that are just as bad. And even if you keep your data in a relatively-safe country that probably has no spying at all, such as Switzerland or Iceland, that's no guarantee that the company hosting your data isn't just plain incompetent. If Google can make a mistake like this, anyone can.
Of course, since it's impossible to be 100% risk-free, it does make sense to try to mitigate that risk by avoiding obviously-bad choices, like using American companies.
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What the fuck is the difference?
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Well,
one set of governments is forcing you to smile and bend over, then takes whatever it needs. The other set takes whatever it needs but you don't know for sure that they do. Both are bastards but the first one is cruel to boot.
Re:Too much trust (Score:5, Informative)
What the fuck is the difference?
the difference is quite simple: with the french you can just treat them as normal eavesdroppers on your tcp connection. like some dude hanging on the same open AP. the solution to that is to just have encrypted connections to whatever service you want to use..
but with nsa and and ms/google/yahoo whoever.. it doesn't matter that your connection to them was encrypted, as they as your "business partner" sell the data off to nsa(forcibly, but they still get a buck). with them the only way is to not use their services - or any american hosted/owned services.
it's not a great difference, but a difference still.
Re:Too much trust (Score:4, Insightful)
No serious company can afford to move completely offshore, out of touch with its armed defense (the US army), unless it has ties to another set of rulers. Social and economic ties to the USA are all very strong for Google. They could never move.
They could move their HQ - I'm sure they'd find out pretty soon that it would be difficult to get the same access to the rulers as they have locally. They didn't go to school with the players, they aren't married to people who know the players, they don't have the right employees, they don't really know the customs, etc. etc. I'm sure you can rebuild Google somewhere else, if you must, but it will only be the name and not the company that moves.
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"Fascist" has never meant that, except in the fantasy of socialists who can't accept that the National Socialist party really was socialist (which, BTW, was very progressive on stuff like minimum wage and universal health care and pensions and so on, at least for non-Jews - didn't stop them from being totalitarian militarists).
The "ism" for government-by-corporation is "mercantilism". Remember, for a couple of centuries it was normal and expected for the government to send the army/navy to protect the inte
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You are probably right about that. And those three are smart people, who will think about what they can expect to achieve with such a move. I believe they have reached the conclusion, that they are more likely to reach a desirable situation for their users by staying in the USA and influencing the political system there.
Remembe
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Just don't trust them, it's simple. First time I saw this option, I knew it was a terrible idea. Anything in "the cloud" should automatically viewed with skepticism and distrust, and even more so if it's Google. You can back up the data on your local computer instead.
This is why I turned off backup (Score:5, Insightful)
I turned off Backup on Android after discovering this. They're going to have to store them in the clear (or I guess reversible), so that the "backup" is reversible - i.e. you recover your backup or add a new phone to your account and it "just works" with your wifi.
However, there's no in-between. I can't choose to backup certain things but exclude very sensitive things, like my wifi password and other credentials. Given what we know about government snooping and the constant notices of breached databases these days, I just don't want to use the backup feature at all, and anyone who does is taking a bit of a gamble IMO.
Can't we have a sub-option to "also include credentials", at the very least?
Re:This is why I turned off backup (Score:5, Insightful)
I turned it off before I ever knew this, because I'm increasingly finding that I don't trust Google -- either in intent or execution.
All they want to do is collect all of your information and use it to sell advertising, they don't give a damn about your privacy.
And that stupid Google+ might be the last straw since everything is trying to foist it on me and I have no interest in it.
But, I gotta ask ... if we don't trust Microsoft and Google, who is left?
Re:This is why I turned off backup (Score:5, Insightful)
But, I gotta ask ... if we don't trust Microsoft and Google, who is left?
I am fine with trusting Microsoft and Google, and indeed anyone with a reliable infrastructure, to provide a backup hosting service that significantly improves the experience with my phone in the event of a disaster. I'm just not fine with entrusting them with access to the contents of those backups, especially when I may not even be aware of or have granular control over what is in them.
A backup passphrase that only I know, and restricting processing to the client-side, would be sufficient to achieve this.
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As random bits they can't decode, sure ... to access the entire contents of the backup and do with as they please because the ToS says so ... no freakin' way.
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well the obvious answer to this would of course be a backup application that would encrypt that stuff and then upload it to google drive or office365 or dropbox or whatever. at least that is still an option on android, on windows phone not so much because.. eh.. only ms has needed access to the phone to do the backups of settings, contacts etc..
Encryption is no panacea (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing. Even if you encrypt the data before giving it to them, and dont keep the key (which is much harder to do than to say) so what? Do you really think any encryption algorithm you are going to use today will stand up to the tools available to script-kiddies in 5 or 10 years? You do understand that once you put something 'in the cloud' it's probably never going away, right?
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Do you really think any encryption algorithm you are going to use today will stand up to the tools available to script-kiddies in 5 or 10 years?
Yes.
http://www.keylength.com/en/4/
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You can still trust me. Send me your data and I'll make sure no one will be able to retrieve it.
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That is why the KGB created their own fork. They saw this in the source code, and didn't like it.
Re:This is why I turned off backup (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me this would be a good place for the alternative ROMs like CyanogenMod to offer non-Google versions of Android which they've certified (by making all the source code open and available, at least for the relevant parts) to work properly in this regard, allowing you to back up data on Google's hosts, but ensuring that it's all encrypted by a passphrase which Google has no access to.
Re:This is why I turned off backup (Score:4, Funny)
if we don't trust Microsoft and Google, who is left?
Don't even think about trusting yourself. I made that mistake once, and I slipped myself some roofies and date-raped myself.
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Why, Apple of course!
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You say that sarcastically, but from what I've seen, Apple seems to put more effort into security than others.
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Think again [eff.org]. When it's privacy related they're pretty much at the bottom. They do put a lot of money into marketing though, and based on profit margins, I'd have to say it seems to be a smarter choice than security and privacy related spending.
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I turned it off before I ever knew this, because I'm increasingly finding that I don't trust Google -- either in intent or execution.
Likewise. Nothing in particular against Google, but the number of entities in which trust is required should be minimized.
I don't allow any passwords or other information to be "backed up" outside my own domain. All backups are local on our own servers and external disks. Remote administration is switched off for the router, and server administration is allowed only from specific LAN IP addresses (router not allowed). Passwords for external sites may be intercepted en route to their intended sites, but o
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It shouldn't be possible to intercept passwords by snooping on IP connections, as long as you're using encryption such as SSL, and not a shitty password-in-plaintext service like FTP.
However, if the destination is compromised (NSA), there's nothing you can do about that.
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And that stupid Google+ might be the last straw since everything is trying to foist it on me and I have no interest in it.
Google+ is exactly like Microsoft's Metro UI in Windows 8: it's a move to co-opt some big competitor (or someone they see as a competitor), by forcing a big change on their existing userbase in order to get them "used to" using this new service.
With Metro, MS saw that the mobile world was passing them by with iOS and Android (and that everyone hated their crappy WinCE offerings before th
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I'm finding it is having the opposite effect ... I'm getting tired of Google.
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I don't really see that. But I only use Google+, never Facebook, and no other Google apps whatsoever. So I see Google+ as a standalone application with no ties to anything else, with no viable alternatives that do the same thing that I will accept.
The only problem with it is that it's trying to lure me into using other bogus Google apps like gmail. It's not that Google+ is luring you to use it because you use other Google apps, but that EVERY google app is luring use to use every other google app. I rea
Re:This is why I turned off backup (Score:5, Informative)
The sad part is that Google damn near at the top of the privacy trust-worthiness scale. Almost everybody else is worse. If you really care about your privacy you need to avoid all hosted services and do everything yourself.
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I turned off Backup on Android after discovering this. They're going to have to store them in the clear (or I guess reversible), so that the "backup" is reversible - i.e. you recover your backup or add a new phone to your account and it "just works" with your wifi.
However, there's no in-between. I can't choose to backup certain things but exclude very sensitive things, like my wifi password and other credentials. Given what we know about government snooping and the constant notices of breached databases these days, I just don't want to use the backup feature at all, and anyone who does is taking a bit of a gamble IMO.
Can't we have a sub-option to "also include credentials", at the very least?
Well, they could offer the option of letting the user set a backup password that is known only to the user (warning the user that if they lose the password, they lose their backups).
Most home users probably won't use it, but those that care about security (like every corporation that uses Android devices) probably will.
Re: This is why I turned off backup (Score:2)
Indeed, this exact option is available to iOS users.
Re: This is why I turned off backup (Score:2)
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And you would trust the encryption implementation to protect your data?
If I'm going to use the device at all, I have to have some level of trust that it's doing what they say it does. Whether they put in a checkbox that says "don't back up my credentials" or let me set a password so only I can decrypt the backups, if I don't trust the manufacturer that the software does what is says, I shouldn't be using the device at all if I'm worried about my privacy or security of my data.
Even if I load my own cyanogenmod operating system that I have personally vetted, if I don't trust th
Re: This is why I turned off backup (Score:2)
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Other people leak your guest wifi password (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's worth mentioning one other side-effect of this "send everything" backup policy: I basically cannot safely guest any visitor who has an Android phone onto my secured WiFi network without their phone sending my WiFi password straight to Google.
This puts me in the awkward predicament of denying visitors WiFi access, or constantly changing the guest password on every device I have that uses it.
If you're reading, Google folks, this is fricking annoying.
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Ever consider a dual radio set up? That way, you can have your secure network, and an open net for guests.
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That's true, but what if your visitors return frequently (family), or you have some of your own devices on the guest account so that e.g. you can use your routers wireless isolation feature for those devices, etc.?
Take the case of family:
* You can put them on the guest network, but every time they come to visit you have to re-issue a password to all of them and reset it when they leave, or else Google has the credentials.
* You can put them on the main network because you trust them with the password. Howeve
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Sounds like what you need is WPA Enterprise :P
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The problem I have with Android is the multiple ways and places you might be backing up data...
There's Google holding all my email, contacts, calendars...
Drop Box get's all my photos...
Those are the choices I made, but then I have a T-Mobile branded backup application, one from "Locate", and another from HTC... where does this data end up? I have no idea... it's not obvious so I don't want to use it.
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Titanium Backup > build-in Google Backup
Once I started using Titanium Backup I turned off the Google Backup. At least I have an option to encrypt my Titanium Backup's. It can backup/restore Wifi Passwords along with everything else.
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Unfortunately, that is not sufficient. I recently got a new phone and, despite my setting my old phone to not backup the passwords (some time after I started using the old phone), they were downloaded to my new phone.
As far as I can tell, turning off the backup merely prevents the phone from sending more data to Google. Once Google has it, Google keeps it.
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okay...
dafuq?
Look, this is a password that is literally only useful within a few hundred feet of your house. Assuming that you're not re-using it for anything else, what exactly is your exploitation story, here? If I tell you that my wifi password is "frobulate" (it really is!), what are you proposing that you can do with that information, given that I'm some anonymous asshole on the internet?
Have an untrusted network (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Have an untrusted network (Score:5, Funny)
I only do my top secret browsing through two separate secure proxy services. NSA will never know that I watch My Little Pony.
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+1
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Anybody who wasn't already assuming that all networked devices for which you haven't personally reviewed all the source code are anything other than hostile network actors is an idiot.
FTFY.
more info (Score:4, Informative)
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Google storing all your WLAN passwords on their application settings backup service without allowing you to encrypt them.
...based upon the above, on what other platforms would you assume that Google has any sort of interaction with your WLAN passwords? I'm really curious.
I mean, they're clearly stealing them by using their vans to read my dog's brain, but that's what the tinfoil hat is for. Not everyone has pets however.
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Well, they have been caught sniffing out WLAN metadata with their street view camera cars in the past, breaking numerous laws in various countries in the process, so the idea that they could attempt to "accidentally store" plaintext WLAN passwords is not that far-fetched.
No need for a tin-foil hat, though, when you can explain the behavior to a simple and straightforward "we don't give a fuck about the security of your data" attitude.
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> No need for a tin-foil hat, though, when you can explain the behavior to a simple and straightforward
> "we don't give a fuck about the security of your data" attitude.
You are not wrong, but you are missing the point of the previous comment. The point was that unencrypted wifi passwords on PCs is not the same issue - because google doesn't generally have access to the unencrypted password on your PC. In fact its pretty unavoidable without going to smart cards.
The android phone, on the other hand, is
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Do Google provide a backup service for anything else?
Upload it to the cloud unencrypted? I don't think so.
But made worse by the fact that on newer Android devices this is enabled by default, and uploads all
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It's time to start assuming that you can't trust anyone with your data.
FTFY.
Welcome to the world of Johnny Mnemonic, minus the cerebral implants and Henry Rollins' terrible acting.
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*sigh* So, all of the dystopian future without any of the fun technology?
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That seems to be the direction we're heading in.
I guess if you want to be an optimist, you can take comfort in the fact they aren't using poor people as food... yet, anyway.
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I think the hoopla is about two things:
- google is not disclosing how they protect our data
- google has full access to data that at least I consider is none of their business, so I'd like to be able to supply my own encryption key.
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That's because they're not.
Surprising? (Score:3)
the fact that Google can read them (and disclose them if forced by 'law') is a bit surprising, too put it nicely.
That's not just nice, that's outright flattery. Seriously, who is surprised by this? Lots of cloud backup storage services don't let you encrypt data (or make it hard to do so), so why would it be surprising that Google, the mother of all data hoarders, would want to store and read this stuff?
Bug? (Score:2)
Thanks a pantload, Chet. (Score:2)
Apple iOS (Score:5, Interesting)
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While not storing cleartext, they do store your WiFi passwords in a reversible encryption.
Okay, let's get a few things straight here.
First, "reversible encryption" is a stupid phrase. There are basically two kinds of encryption: symmetric encryption and asymmetric encryption. Symmetric encryption uses a single secret key to both encrypt and decrypt data. It's reversible (using the one key). Asymmetric encryption uses two keys: one key to encrypt and a different key to decrypt. It's also reversible, but the encrypt and decrypt operations can only be performed with the corresponding key. They're b
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Granted "reversible" is redundant when talking about encryption, I never implied a hash was reversible.
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You only mentioned "reversible encryption", which is redundant. I added the bit about hashes because people are constantly confusing hashes with encryption.
I specifically used the term "secret" because your password isn't necessarily your secret. In the case of WPA, for example, it's that generated hash that is the real secret. You could store that instead of the original password and it would be just fine. However, the secret is the piece of information that's used to access the network anyway. The fact th
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...And how is the keychain "easily snooped"? That's news to me. Please elaborate....
https://github.com/ptoomey3/Keychain-Dumper [github.com]
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...And how is the keychain "easily snooped"? That's news to me. Please elaborate....
https://github.com/ptoomey3/Keychain-Dumper [github.com]
This only works for Jailbroken devices. AFAIK, iOS6.1.3+ is not capable of jailbreak. How are you going to get the keys from my iOS devices running iOS6.1.3?
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Which is it, Google? (Score:2)
Do no evil (Score:5, Funny)
But I guess they do a lot of stupid.
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So what? (Score:5, Informative)
So what? Concern where concern is due. Do you really think that Google is going to be fetching your phone backups, hoping for a wireless password, then driving to your house and connecting to your wifi so that they can... sniff your traffic? Impersonate you on the internet?
How does this in any way matter? even if the password _were_ encrypted, it's reverseable encryption -- it _has_ to be. So they could just decrypt it, anyway. This is the same as on Windows: you can get a wireless key viewer that gives you the password of every network that Windows has memorized. Further, your computer is probably a great deal more accessible to anyone, especially those who are interested in your wireless network, than Google's phone backups.
As for those who are going to say, "Let the user encrypt it with a password!" ... most don't do that. Most people won't put one in, many will forget it if they do, you can't link it to a phone identifier because part of the purpose is in case the phone is lost, and part of the functionality is syncing to Google services -- so it has to be decrypted anyway. Wake me up again when Google syncs all the pictures you've taken with your camera to Picasa and posts them on your auto-created Google+. That'll be a fun day.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong. It could be encrypted with a key that only the user knew. With proper key choices Google would have no way of decrypting
I know some people like to believe that if Google, the NSA, the Chinese or some other group really really wanted to, they could decrypt any encrypted information, even without the password.
This is false. It is still infeasible for anyone to crack Triple DES info encrypted with a reasonable choice of keys.
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I'm glad to see a few rational thinkers on this forum, but that's not the end of the story. If the NSA or Chinese government really really wanted to see all you are up to, they wouldn't be trying to decrypt your password. They'd probably just hack into your system because they have 0-day hacks that you can't know about and install a keylogger. If you're really paranoid and you boot from CD and run everything from RAM, they can still install a physical keylogger if they care enough to get physical access. Th
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're a company and anyone associates to your corporate network using an Android phone, you've now got a problem.
And how are you supposed to stop this with policy other than blanket banning android phones? Ignore the fact that google is "good guy google" and think about what happens if the database is somehow exposed to hackers, or if there is a malicious google employee who decides to sell 1.4 million wifi passwords?
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Whether or not someone thinks they want to, the question I have is that if you're running a Google O/S, with a good chunk of your stuff available using Google software via Google products, why in the world would Google ever need your wifi password to access your wifi network?
I
New device every day (Score:5, Funny)
This is why, at the end of each day, I use a sledge hammer to pound my phone, all my computers, my wireless equipment, and my ISP interface into little pieces and then put them all in a 3000 degree furnace before burying them in the backyard. Each morning I get up and install all new equipment, then reinstall everything from the original CDs, creating a day-unique username and password for everything. Sure, it takes a while, and costs a few thousand dollars a day, and restoring my 5TB movie server from backup is a pain, but it's the price I pay for convenience and privacy.
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I call shenanigans. Everyone knows your department ran out of money after spending 2.7 million in taxpayer dollars doing this :-)
Situation may not be as it appears (Score:5, Informative)
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At this point only Google can say for sure how it is.
Is the Google backup service in Cyanogenmod a binary blob?
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One comment says that the only thing the panicked bug reporter knows is that the WLAN password was retrieved in the clear, but it could be that this information actually is encrypted but the retrieval decrypted it.
Google uses SSL for basically everything, so it was almost certainly SSL-encrypted in transit.
Works as intended (Score:3, Insightful)
I backup data to a server, I restore data to my phone. OMG!!! They are storing my data noes!!!! This is just fear mongering.
Google Is providing a data backup service (which is opt-in at first boot) that backs up your data and you'd like them to encrypt the data then, what delete the key? Maybe have you type in a second password? Seriously, why make the android first boot process more cumbersome.
Suspicion !== fact (Score:4, Informative)
seriously what the fuck...
Title: "Google Storing WLAN Passwords In the Clear"
Post: "So far it's not known whether the passwords are stored encrypted"
fuck you "husemann", i don't care if this is about google or MS that everyone loves to hate, it's BS and so are you. by your logic I might as well make this post:
Airbags cause heads to fill with raisins and explode:
... it is not yet known if airbags cause heads to fill with raisins and explode.
This was revealed many places a while back (Score:2)
This was revealed many places a while back. Dragorn of Kismet covered it back in 2010:
http://blog.kismetwireless.net/2010/08/google-wifi-android-and-too-much-data.html [kismetwireless.net]
Of course (Score:2)
Well of course they're storing them in the clear. How else could they send them to the NSA?
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Encrypted on their servers mean they can decrypt on their servers. It should be encrypted on the client
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And MAC spoofing has been around since 5 minutes after MACs were invented. The wired is a little better, until they (whoever "they" are) install a passive tap.
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The WiFi standards do. Check for WPA Enterprise in your security config. Every wifi router I've messed with supports it.
Downside is it requires you to run a separate authentication server (usually RADIUS) to support it.