Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 16: Going Wireless Away from Home
Securing your Wi-Fi with WiTopia
Our favorite hosted VPN service comes from the
folks at WiTopia, with their Personal VPN service.
For $39.99 a year, WiTopia will secure your
Wi-Fi traffic by routing it through an encrypted
VPN tunnel, which keeps your data from prying
eyes all the way from your Mac or PC (or iPhone,
more on this in a moment) to WiTopia’s secure
server (from which it then makes its way onto the
wild world of the Internet).
You can get two types of VPNs from WiTopia:
� An SSL VPN, which uses the same technology
(secure sockets layer) that secure Web
pages use to encrypt all your data traffic.
� A PPTP VPN, which uses the same technology
used by many big corporations in
their VPNs. (PPTP stands for point to point
tunneling protocol.)
The SSL VPN has been WiTopia’s traditional
product, built around an open source software
effort called (appropriately) OpenVPN (www.
openvpn.net). The WiTopia folks added PPTP
VPN support in 2007 as a way of adding support
for even more clients, including the famous
Apple iPhone. Mac and Windows users can
download the OpenVPN software from WiTopia’s
Web site; for PPTP VPNs, users simply take
advantage of the PPTP VPN client software built
into most operating systems (including Windows
XP and beyond, Mac OS X, and Apple’s version of
OS X for the iPhone and iPod Touch).
As we write, WiTopia is offering users a choice
of either VPN system for $39.99 a year, but eventually
they plan to sell different versions of
Personal VPN at different prices for the PPTP
and SSL variants. Either way, it’s a good deal and
a great way to secure your network.
Many corporations provide VPN services for their remote (work at home)
and mobile workers. If yours does, make sure you use it in hot spots. If
you don’t have access to a corporate VPN, consider subscribing to a VPN
service such as WiTopia’s Personal VPN (www.witopia.net) or HotSpotVPN
(www.hotspotvpn.com). These are hosted VPN services, which provide you
with a secure and reliable VPN solution over the Internet for a monthly or
annual fee. For more information about WiTopia, check out the sidebar titled
“Securing your Wi-Fi with WiTopia.”
If you can’t (or don’t want to) bother with a VPN service in unsecured hot
spots, you should practice safe browsing. That means you should pay close
attention to the SSID you are connecting to and make sure it is the one you
mean to connect to. Don’t connect to a free public Wi-Fi network unless that’s
actually the SSID advertised for the hot spot you’re in!
You should also use secured/encrypted connections whenever possible.
That means, for example, connecting to secure Web pages and checking your
browser to make sure you have actually done so whenever you’re doing
something sensitive online (such as online banking or even e-mail). Make sure
that you are connected to a Web site with an https rather than http prefix to
the URL. When you’re on the secured site, click the lock icon in your browser
(it’s typically up in the address bar of your browser, or in the bottom-right
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