Hey all! I often see an assumption that never connecting your smart TV to your Wi-Fi was not enough, since the TV could simply connect to a neighboring open Wi-Fi. I configured a router with an open Wi-Fi, connect the WAN port to a mirroring switch, and monitor it through Wireshark in the hope to see a rogue TV connecting to my honeypot free open Wi-Fi. I had 6 TVs plugged in with no ethernet or Wi-Fi set up with the honeypot right next to it.
I now have a 2.1Gb packet capture to sift through. So far, I checked if any IP that would have been given by my router's DHCP and found two false positive (another router doing constant ARP (both routers had the same DHCP range) and a few reset packets from an unknown device with no MAC address that I can't identify… but it had no active connection to the web, so it doesn't really matter in the end).
I also checked TLS handshake, TCP/UDP traffic and DNS calls and couldn't find any TV to connect to the open Wi-Fi. So unless I failed at identifying traffic in there somewhere, I haven't been able to prove that any device would freely connect to an open Wi-Fi.
If anyone have tips on how I could spot rogue packets or connections, I'm all ears! I have an arsenal of TVs to my disposition and would really like to be able to prove if Smart TV (or other smart devices) really do connect to open Wi-Fi networks or not.
Source: r/privacy · by /u/sp_RTINGS