Echan

Hey all

I speak to a friend of mine a lot over AIM and occasionally MSN. They recently told me that they got their roommate to admit to reading all our instant messages over the last several months while intending to spy on someone else. I'm told that they caught on because the guy occasionally mentioned minor things they had no business knowing.

All the issues aside, I am fairly unhappy about it. I reviewed everything I said and there's nothing to hide, no sensitive information was read or anything of the sort, but I feel I still need closure. It's just a personal space I feel really uncomfortable about when people invade. I type when someone is looking over my shoulder and I get nervous for no apparent reason when a friend is flipping through my ipod or checking their email on my laptop.

That being said, I don't really know the person and I'm more like the collateral damage in whatever their insane quest is. My friend told me that they changed the password on the router, but I need to know if that even did anything. I'm curious as to what methods they could have used to do this and which ones if any are detectable. I realize I could just communicate with something that's more secure, but I just need to learn about this for my own peace of mind. I need to know what they likely did for closure. It sounds bizarre but it's sort of like how family members want to know what their loved ones last moments were when they get into an accident/murder.

I know that they previously had full control of the router(wireless, does this matter?), set up the network and runs a linux box if that helps. From there, all my research is going in circles due to inexperience. I've read about Squid, transparent/intercepting proxies and setting up a linux machine as the DHCP server, it's mostly gibberish for me and I'm not sure which of those actually need router access, or if there are settings in the router I could ask to be checked to tell if they are continuing the behavior.

I also Googled up endless shareware that allows you to spy on aim conversations. I get the impression that those just sniff packets out of the air and that the only encryption is the WEP which they already have to access the internet and no setting on the router is going to prevent that.

Any information would be appreciated, sort of driving me nuts knowing that some friends creepy roommate would spy on them like that. As a side note, I just want to learn enough to know how it works without knowing enough to be able to do it myself if that makes sense.

Thanks

oiekeooiyw

The major thing is that if someone else is in charge of the LAN (the network your friend was using) they can see everything that isn't encrypted that goes through the router (with the right knowledge).
WEP doesn't matter. WEP or WPA encrypts the data from a computer using wireless to connect to the access point. Once the data hits the AP isn't no longer encrypted.
My guess is that the person is using a packet sniffer on the Linux box to record the data going through the router and then looking at the stuff that interests them.
You can use one of the IM clients that encrypts messages between the two parties.

yotta

Chaning the password on the router won't work. You don't have to be in charge of the LAN, even on a wired network you can sniff like this by tricking the other computers into thinking that your computer is the router (this can be detected if you know what to look for, though). On a wireless network, it can done pretty much undetected unless it's using WPA or WEP with EAP and RADIUS (which gives each user a diffrent key).

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TRexS4

This might help. I have it. Have to have firefox though.
http://johbuc6.coconia.net/doku.php/...3277a3cd5f5bb5

Dilbert1234567

i tunnel directly to my router (a m0n0wall based system) so my outbound and inbound traffic is all encrypted. there are some programs that you can use with GAIM to encrypt your messages OTR (off the record) both encrypts and provides plausible deny ability.

http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/win-in...otr-setup.html

oh and on sniffing, WEP is useless, however WPA will give some protection, if you have the passphrase for WPA, you still can't view other peoples traffic out of the air, this is because WPA uses a temporal key generated each time it is used. however, by arp poisoning, you can indeed sniff all traffic on the network.

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Pragma

Based on my experience, what I imagine the situation with your friend / friend's roommate is the following:

The friend and roommate connect through the wireless network to the router, then go from there to the internet. The roommate was probably running something like dsniff to capture all messages that were going across in the clear. Changing the password on the router won't make a tiny bit of difference.

I'm also very suspicious of the "intending to spy on someone else" part, as he'd only be able to spy on people on the wireless network - which would be the friend+roommate (or are there other roommates?).

Either way, the best way to communicate would be to find an encrypted method - AIM+SSL certs (do they still do that? I remember reading about it a while ago) or something similar. Because the roommate has access to the transmission medium, it boils down to trust: do you/your friend trust the roommate not to try again? With physical access, you're basically hosed if he really wants in - worst case he'll install a keystroke logger and get whatever passwords he needs to own the net again.

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Twizted

The best rule of thumb is... don't say anything on IM or email that you wouldn't say aloud in the middle of a crowded room. Even if your friend came up with some ultra secure fashion for communication to his router... your IM is still travelling over the open internet. AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Chat - none of them are secure messaging. Some corp solutions are (encrypted TLS/MTLS connections all the way) but the free ones aren't...

Jason

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