Comcast storing WiFi passwords in cleartext?

Thu Apr 25 17:14:47 UTC 2019

On 4/25/19 8:04 AM, K. Scott Helms wrote:
> Just so you know, if you have an embedded router from a service provider 
> all of that data is _already_ being transmitted and has been for a long 
> long time.

Responding to a pseudo-random message ...

If you are an average consumer and purchase a managed solution (in this 
case a WAP that comes as part of your package) I think it's perfectly 
reasonable for the vendor to manage it accordingly, even if said 
consumer doesn't fully understand the implications of that decision.

In my mind, the problem here is not that the vendor has access to this 
data, it's that they are STORING it in the first place, and storing it 
in the clear to boot. In the hypothetical service call that we've 
speculated is the driver for this, the extra 15 or 20 seconds that it 
would take to pull the data via SNMP is in the noise.

There are two mindsets that desperately need changing in the tech world:

1. Do not store data that you don't have a legitimate requirement to store
2. Do not store anything even remotely sensitive in the clear

We live in a world of all breaches, all of the time. So we need to start 
thinking not in terms of just protecting said data from the outside, but 
rather in terms of limiting the attack surface to start with, and 
protecting the data at rest. So that WHEN there is a breach, whether 
from within or without, the damage will be minimal.

As many have pointed out, this information is freely available via SNMP, 
so it's a classic example of something that didn't need to be stored in 
the first place.

Doug