Securing your iPhone’s wifi traffic! (encapsulate the packets)

May 7, 2008

Have you ever been siting at your local coffee shop. You decided to start playing with your iPhone. Ohhh an email has just arrived. You visit a few websites. Log into your wordpress blog to make a quick post about “How amazing those beans are at Peets!”

Many iPhone users are blind to the fact that their iPhones are constantly looking for a faster connection. When you joined the free open wifi hotspot at the local coffee shop. The data being transmitted from your iPhone to the internet is unencrypted.

You may be asking yourself! Why is this such a big deal? I have nothing to hide? When in fact you have just given out the username and password to your wordpress blog! Even better the login credentials to your email account. Many services we all access on a regular basis are still unencrypted (Non SSL). We would all like to think in a perfect world our iPhones are safe and secure because they are designed by Apple. This isn’t a perfect world!

When surfing an unencrypted public wifi hotspot your iPhone reveals a ton of information.

- E-mail passwords for unprotected accounts
- The contents of e-mail sent or received from unprotected accounts
- The contents of e-mail pushed to the iPhone by Yahoo! Mail
- Unencrypted Web page contents—typically anything not involving e-commerce or banking
- The list of stocks followed in the Stocks widget
- Map information requested with the Maps widget

~MacWorkd

Most email services use SSL to protect login information. (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo and .Mac) If you are using corporate email or email from your website (domain). Check to see if SSL is available. I would highly recommend it!

Rent yoursenf a VPN account!

I currently rent my VPN account from a company called VPNGates. VPNGates allows me to send all of my internet traffic through their servers. This service is fully encrypted and will protect all data going to their servers. Allowing you to surf via a public wifi hotspot without any worries. (Servers are available in the US, UK, and Germany.)

When setting your VPN cradentials into your iPhone. Select the option to send all traffic directly through through the VPN.