0

How can one remain anonymous on secure company Wi-Fi in which you can only login in with company issued password?

Anders
  • 65,052
  • 24
  • 180
  • 218
C. Ama
  • 1
  • 1
  • 4
    To whom are you trying to appear anonymous? – Chenmunka Mar 08 '18 at 11:46
  • I'd suggest you don't do anything you shouldn't on a corporate network including logging into any services for which you wouldn't hand over your passwords to your employer. Short of using a VPN you cannot be anonymous, and they may not welcome you doing that. – iainpb Mar 08 '18 at 13:50
  • can you provide more detail? you can follow anonymous on a public network link, but I suppose a question also requires some theoretical circumstances. I know in one circumstance I was in (was legal) the wireless I was connected to was not a WPA2 enterprise and it used a portal login. this allowed me to clone someone else connected to the wireless (their IP and Mac), bully them off the network and steal their session. thus I would pretend to be them. – TheHidden Mar 08 '18 at 14:10
  • @orbuculum this is not a duplicate of a question asking *if* the company can see activity, this is a question asking how to hide when the company can. – schroeder Mar 09 '18 at 20:51

1 Answers1

3

I am writing this under the assumption that the only thing you don't control is the WiFi network available to you.

Some assumptions:

1) Your company doesn't passively monitor their network - they don't care about VPN tunnels, etc. You're worried about a bored Systems Administrator judging you for browsing My Little Pony fan sites during your break. You can't stand to see the judgy look in their eyes when you run into them at the water cooler.

2) Your company doesn't care if you use their network or not.

3) Your company doesn't care what you do on your device.

4) You don't care who snoops on you, as long as it's not your employers.

These are all big assumptions, but you haven't supplied any information to the contrary. If these assumptions are wrong, some or all of this answer will not be appropriate.

You have a few options:

1) Install a VPN client and connect to a VPN service. This creates an encrypted tunnel between you and the VPN server. You company cannot monitor traffic over a VPN connection.

2) Browse over Tor. Similar to a VPN service, Tor routes your traffic in a way that prevents the local network from snooping on the content you are browsing.

3) Use your phone as a mobile hotspot. Secure this hotspot using a WPA2 passcode. Your company can't eavesdrop on (2|3|4)G connections as that data is encrypted between you and your ISP (in this case, your phone service provider).

With enough time and effort, someone can correlate your observable traffic and other traffic and figure out who you were and what you were doing, but that's not something your employer will spend time and money doing.

Monica Apologists Get Out
  • 4,031
  • 1
  • 15
  • 22
  • 1
    It's worth noting that using Tor on someone else's network may _still_ not provide a cloak of anonymity. For example, I was just reading about a [student at Harvard who was caught making bomb threats](https://www.forbes.com/sites/runasandvik/2013/12/18/harvard-student-receives-f-for-tor-failure-while-sending-anonymous-bomb-threat/#21f382ee5457). He tried to fly under the radar by using Tor, but the university "was able to determine that, in the several hours leading up to the receipt of the e-mail messages ... Eldo Kim accessed Tor using Harvard’s wireless network." –  Mar 08 '18 at 18:43
  • Yeah. Actually, even inside a VPN tunnel, everyone along the route between you and the exit node can tell your using Tor because of Tor's packet size - always 582 bytes per packet. That's pretty easy to spot, regardless of other encryption. You won't ever hide that you are connected to Tor, but once you hit your entry node, no one knows whose traffic is whose. – Monica Apologists Get Out Mar 08 '18 at 19:37
  • 1
    There are ways to obfuscate TOR's packet size. – MikeP Mar 08 '18 at 21:54
  • That's true as well. – Monica Apologists Get Out Mar 09 '18 at 13:42