[AusNOG] Estimate of what Google StreetView may have captured

Daniel Hood dsmhood at gmail.com
Mon Jun 21 11:21:34 EST 2010


How many users use POP though? And how many users store / link
valuable data in their POP account such as their facebook accounts,
online banking, personal information and passwords for everything.
They'd only need to get a username and password to a couple of users
who have "Do not delete from server" set up on their clients to get
everything.

Daniel

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 3:53 PM, phil colbourn <philcolbourn at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was interested enough (and with time due to ill health) to see if I could
> make an estimate of what Google may have captured.
> Here are my assumptions:
> 1. From the ABS December 2009, 5.2M ADSL and Cable
> subscribers. http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8153.0/
> 2. 114,400 TB downloaded data per year (ABS)
> 3. Uploaded data is 10% of downloaded data.
> 4. All subscribers use unencrypted WiFi.
> 5. WiFi range is +-250m
> 6. Sample 5 channels per second (I read this somewhere)
> 7. Data in overlapping channels can be received in channels 1, 6, 11
> 8. StreetView car travels at 40km/h between 8:00 and 16:00.
> 9. Uploaded data is sent evenly throughout the day from domestic homes and
> that between 8:00 and 16:00 the upload data rates are average.
> 10. Households send 5 non-HTTPS passwords per day.
> So basically I assume the street car samples 3 channels at the rate of 5 per
> second.
> I calculate the time the car is in range of a WiFi base as 45s and can
> sample 15s worth of data.
> This means that they can record about 1400 Bytes of data per SSID.
> The probability of capturing a password is about 0.1% so about 6000
> passwords would be captured.
> If, however, 50% of WiFi is encrypted then the above numbers are halved to
> 700B and 3000 passwords.
> Based on my assumptions I think the values will be much lower.
> 1. During the day is not the peak time for downloads from households.
> 2. Encrypted WiFi is on the increase and seems to be higher than 50%. Maybe
> 80%.
> 3. Few services use unencrypted passwords - I can not think of any except
> for POP based email.
> 4. WiFi range is probably not +-250m and the ability to pickup a
> transmission from a laptop/mobile at these distances is low.
> 5. Uploaded data is probably less that 10% of Downloaded data.
> Does anyone have better assumptions?
>
>
> --
> Phil
>
> http://philatwarrimoo.blogspot.com
> http://code.google.com/p/snmp2xml
>
> "Someone has solved it and uploaded it for free."
>
> "If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to look."
>
> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
> Arthur C. Clarke - Who does magic today?
>
>
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