[SOLVED] WiFi Repeaters - Internet Snooping?

[seanthered]

I recently bought a WiFi repeater to cover a dead area in my house, and it works so well, I am a little concerned. All I had to do, was connect it to my WiFi network with the password, and now it seemlessly repeats my Internet signal. My devices don't seem to know they are communicating via the repeater to the main router at all. It made me wonder, if you knew the guest password to a WiFi anywhere, couldn't you setup a repeater to capture that traffic, and then you'd be able to see all of it? And, if you did, would a VPN be enough to protect people as you saw all the data going to and from their devices? Here's hoping VPNs do the trick. It's a little worrisome.

 

[USAFRet]

I recently bought a WiFi repeater to cover a dead area in my house, and it works so well, I am a little concerned. All I had to do, was connect it to my WiFi network with the password, and now it seemlessly repeats my Internet signal. My devices don't seem to know they are communicating via the repeater to the main router at all. It made me wonder, if you knew the guest password to a WiFi anywhere, couldn't you setup a repeater to capture that traffic, and then you'd be able to see all of it? And, if you did, would a VPN be enough to protect people as you saw all the data going to and from their devices? Here's hoping VPNs do the trick. It's a little worrisome.

The key concept: "if you knew the guest password to a WiFi anywhere "

I an see my neighbors WiFi networks.
I do not know the passwords.
Hence, I cannot access their network and systems.

 

[kanewolf]

I recently bought a WiFi repeater to cover a dead area in my house, and it works so well, I am a little concerned. All I had to do, was connect it to my WiFi network with the password, and now it seemlessly repeats my Internet signal. My devices don't seem to know they are communicating via the repeater to the main router at all. It made me wonder, if you knew the guest password to a WiFi anywhere, couldn't you setup a repeater to capture that traffic, and then you'd be able to see all of it? And, if you did, would a VPN be enough to protect people as you saw all the data going to and from their devices? Here's hoping VPNs do the trick. It's a little worrisome.

This is what is known as a "man in the middle" attack. You could see traffic that was not encrypted. Most traffic is encrypted.

 

[bill001g]

Not a huge risk as stated by kanewolf, most internet traffic is already encrypted by https.

A feature that is required for most forms of repeaters is called WDS. Because of exactly the situation you describe this feature is disabled by default on many routers and many require you to put in lists of mac addresses of devices that can act as a repeater. So someone would have to have the password and be able to connect to your router via WDS.
In some ways it would be nice is all routers disabled this feature but so many end consumers are lazy and do not want to configure even their passwords.

You want to always assume someone is snooping so always run https, you can also use chrome encrypted DNS. VPN has a lot of overhead and lately you get massive amount of captcha garbage from cloudflare and google.