It turns out that the attack I described is called the "evil twin". <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_twin_%28wireless_networks%29>
Antti, if you don't mind, I'll retarget this bug report towards thwarting that attack. Showing the encryption type would not be a complete solution to disambiguating identically-named networks, whether they were coincidental or malicious. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to indicator-network in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1258496 Title: show wireless encryption type Status in indicator-network package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Currently the indicator only shows whether or not a wireless network is secured, by showing a padlock. In a situation where we have two accesspoints which both have the same ESSID (name) but different encryption (e.g. WEP vs. WPA) they provide two separate networks. Now the indicator shows two identical items and the user has no way of figuring out which is which. Above scenario is a very rare one, but still completely valid. Neither nm-applet or macosx networking menu bother to deal with this situation, they just show two identical networks, but Android is always showing the encryption scheme beneath the network name. We can either A) do nothing B) always have the encryption type visible somehow C) be smart about it and only show the encryption type when we detect that the name and padlock is not enough To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-network/+bug/1258496/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp