If your mother uses wifi at home to send you e-mail, and your home network is not protected by WEP or WPA, what reasons would you suggest to her for enabling one of these two protocols at home if the liability of reading those e-mails still exists once her message leaves your home, on it’s way to school?
If my mom uses WiFi at home to send me an email at school, but my home network is not protected by WPA, she might as well just come to campus and read the email over the intercom system for the entire student body to hear. My mom might not realize it but when packets of data are sent over the internet, it gets handled at switching points called routers. At each router, the packet of data is stored, examined, checked, analyzed, and sent on its way. Since she is using a wireless network service, it makes it very easy for hackers to obtain our information undetected. I would ask my mom if she really thinks it is wise to send me important unprotected information over the internet. I would tell her that according to Abelson, in 2001, credit card numbers that were sent via internet were hacked in to because it was impossible to prevent snoopers from looking at them. Would she want that to happen to us? The solution to protect the data she wants to send is to encrypt the information so that only I, the recipient, could decrypt it. With WPA, when a hacker tries to read our information, all they will see is an undecipherable scramble of bits.
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Be careful here... WPA isn't going to protect you both. It's going to protect HER computer.
ReplyDeleteHer e-mail, once it's on the Internet, is no longer encrypted or protected. When it reaches JMU's network, it's in a safer harbor.
The only way to send a real "secret" message between you both is to encrypt the email itself. You could both use something like PGP to encrypt the messages.