Bypassing Captive Portals and Limited Networks

Architecture and Background

Common hotspot software like Chilispot and Sputnik allow anyone to set up a restricted WiFi router or Ethernet network with a captive portal, asking for money, advertising, or personal information in exchange for access to the Internet. In this talk I take a look at how these and similar restrictive networks work, how they identify and restrict users, and how with a little preparation we can reach the Internet regardless of what barriers they throw up.

Vulnerability Analysis

Grant Bugher has been hacking and coding since the early 90’s and working professionally in information security for the last 12 years. He is currently a security engineer for a cloud service provider, and has previously been an architect, program manager and software engineer on a variety of online services, developer tools and platforms.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

Grant is a prior speaker at BlackHat and DEF CON and a regular DEF CON attendee since DEF CON 16. Most of his research and work is on cloud computing and storage platforms, application security, and detecting & investigating attacks against web-scale applications.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies