Since some time, Deutsche Bahn rolled public wireless lan called “WLAN am Bahnhof” out at 25 railroad stations, you can choose between 4 providers. Sounds really nice, but beside the economical conditions, there is also at least one security issue.
Connecting to the network and opening your favorite browser redirects you to a encrypted portal. So far, so good … the really bad news is, that the certificate expired over 6 years ago.
This seems to be a normal behavior, since it happens often, that invalid certificates are used. This leeds to blunted users, which aren’t verifying such certificates anymore, even when it’s important.
Does anybody know a reasonable way to notify anybody who can solve the problem there beside the normal contact forms?
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It’s entirely proper to ignore the issue in this case.
SSL does two things: it encrypts the traffic, and it verifies the destination. A user of wireless networking at the train station doesn’t want to be snooped, so encryption is cool, but doesn’t much care about the specific identity of the provider. If this were an online banking application, it would be very different, because you don’t want to send money to the wrong people.
Technical you true, but blunting users is a general problem. It shouldn’t be such a trick to bring a valid certificate in place.
Noone cares about WLAN am Bahnhof. It is only a project running by damagers to make them look cool. If things don’t work, Deutsche Bahn will send you to your mobile provider (even if the fault is clearly with the infrastructure at the train station), who will promptly send you back to Deutsche Bahn.
For example, the packet filter in Frankfurt/Main Hbf does not allow any user to get through to the T-Mobile login portal to register for the WLAN. Noone cares.
I stopped caring long ago. WLAN am Bahnhof is just too expensive. Pop in your UMTS card and go online anywhere. And have a provider who cares. At least marginally more than Deutsche Bahn does.