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Network Security While Traveling?
truesaer writes "I'll be spending all of next year backpacking through South America. In the past I've used Internet cafes while away, but this time I plan to bring a netbook and rely primarily on Wi-Fi hotspots. I'll be facing the same issues and risks that business travelers in hotels and airports face, as well as those encountered by millions of other backpackers, gap-year travelers, and students. Since my trip is so long I'll have no choice but to access my banking, credit card, and investment accounts on public networks. I will not have a system at home to connect through. Other than an effective firewall, a patched system, and the use of SSL, what else should I do to protect my information? Keep in mind that many places have very poor bandwidth and latency."
Check the time mentioned in the summary. I would normally agree with you, and don't typically even use internet cafes while gone for a few weeks. However, I can't imagine being totally unconnected to email for a whole year. Yes, I could do without Slashdot, but just checking the news back home and following up with friends and family would be mandatory.
There's not much you can do, this is why SSL saves millions of people's asses everyday - just be ultra-suspicious of any warnings that you don't normally get. This is why everyone has a "trusted" network piped into their house by their ISP, and why they get so uppity when that trust is abused (DNS redirection, deep packet inspection, traffic analysis, advertisement insertion etc).
Have a software firewall at *ALL* times that distrusts everything... on Windows I use Zonealarm with everything set to "Internet" and all the high-security settings for that (only exception is an OpenVPN interface which can *obviously* only be my remote access into my trusted networks at home - I let OpenVPN - the program - connect to the Internet and I let the OpenVPN interface do whatever the hell it wants ["trusted"], and obviously have all the checks enabled for certificate-authentication to get onto my home network). On Linux, that's just bog-standard iptables doing its job the same as ever.
I don't expect anything non-SSL to be secure by default. I treat it as if I was using Tor in that respect. Make sure you have Gmail or whatever set to "always use https". If you want anything better than that (i.e. email, IM, http, etc. traffic), or better assurance overall, you have to have a VPN to be safe.
My OpenVPN automatically deletes other routes except for the essential ones and adds a default route through my VPN interface so when connected to home I *know* everything has to be using the VPN to communicate in that instance (hate the idea that if OpenVPN dies, there might be "another" route lurking which sends things out on another interface - I've seen it happen with some "automatic" configurations on Windows).
I often game over an OpenVPN instance, even when playing locally, so don't take heed of the rubbish about it being too costly in latency terms - of course, if you are in a foreign country and relaying to another, it will lag, but the actual overhead is not much worse than just ordinary IP routing to your destination.
Basically - SSL in some form or another, whether that's direct or over a VPN... otherwise you cannot trust things. Of course, millions of people trust ordinary wifi points all over the world, all day, every day. If you decide to follow their lead, that's up to you.
That sums it up pretty well...no home, parents that can only operate a power button, and troubleshooting via phone from Guyana could be tricky even if I were to leave a machine with a tech-savvy friend. VPNing to a hosted machine didn't occur to me for whatever reason, I'll probably look into that. This is probably an area where compromises will have to be made, but my first step is to avoid any potential complications because they'll be a real pain to deal with.