Open Challenges for Secure and Scalable Wi-Fi Connectivity in Rural Areas
This addresses security risks for rural populations relying on emerging connectivity solutions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing hotspot analysis.
The paper tackled the security vulnerabilities of pay-for-use Wi-Fi hotspots in rural areas by conducting surveys in the Philippines and India and demonstrating practical attacks like connection hijacking and rogue hotspots, resulting in the identification of widespread deployments and specific security flaws.
Providing reliable, affordable, and secure Internet connectivity in rural areas remains a major challenge. Pay-for-use Wi-Fi hotspots are emerging as a scalable solution to provide affordable Internet access in underserved and rural regions. Despite their growing adoption, their security properties remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a security analysis of these hotspot ecosystems based on Wi-Fi surveys and practical attack validation. We first perform a Wi-Fi survey conducted in two countries, namely the Philippines and India, to understand the deployment and adoption of such systems in practice. Our results suggest that Piso-WiFi pay-to-use hotspots are particularly widespread in rural regions of the Philippines, and that India's PM-WANI initiative is slowly gaining traction. We then perform a security assessment of these deployments and demonstrate two practical attacks: hijacking another user's paid connection; and rogue hotspots. We analyze the root causes of these vulnerabilities, introduce threat models tailored to pay-for-use hotspot deployments, and outline practical security improvements, including a secure caching architecture. Our findings highlight security challenges in emerging rural connectivity infrastructure and provide directions toward more secure and scalable deployments.