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With Wi-Fi Sense, Microsoft keeps a list of open networks that are known to be safe and reliable, like
the official hotspots found in airports and shopping malls and hotel lobbies and increasingly in public
areas in cities. When you or your users visit a new place using a Windows 10 device with Wi-Fi Sense
turned on, they’ll never see fake hotspots run by criminals; instead, they’ll connect automatically to the
known network that has established a reputation as safe and reliable.
The Connect To Networks Shared By My Contacts option is designed for use with consumer-grade
Wi-Fi access points and routers that use the WPA2 standard for authentication, with a shared key that
users enter to gain access. As part of the process of connecting to a WPA2-secured home network on a
Windows 10 device, the user has the option to share the connection with contacts and friends.
Sharing a connection this way doesn’t allow the person using that shared connection to re-share
with their friends. For that, they need the passphrase.
On work networks, of course, you shouldn’t be using passphrase-based security. Instead, your
network should be secured using 802.11X authentication with a RADIUS server, so that anyone connecting
to it has to sign in using credentials that you manage. It’s relatively easy to add this setup on a large
corporate network. Smaller businesses can look at a service like JumpCloud (http://jumpcloud.com)
to provide RADIUS-as-a-service at a low cost. (In fact, the service is especially attractive for very small
businesses, because it’s free for up to 10 users.)
The Paid Wi-Fi Services option is a companion piece to a new Windows Store app from Microsoft,
called (naturally) Microsoft Wi-Fi. It uses an industry-standard authentication mechanism to provide
secure access to networks, on a pay-as-you-go basis. This program is still in the process of rolling out,
so it might be some time before you’re able to use this feature in locations you visit regularly.
Making secure connections to corporate networks
Remote networks are, by definition, untrusted. A worker who connects to a free Wi-Fi hotspot in an airport
or uses a hotel’s guest network runs the risk of having the connection intercepted by a malicious
outsider, with potentially devastating consequences for data on a corporate network.
The solution, historically, is to use a virtual private network (VPN), which encrypts the connection
between the corporate network and the remote PC so that packets traveling over the untrusted network
are unreadable by an attacker.
Windows 8 included a basic VPN client. Windows 8.1 added support for a limited selection of VPN
providers, including Check Point, F5, Juniper Networks, and SonicWall, in addition to the Microsoft
client. Windows 10 expands this capability to any VPN solution provider, with distribution through the
Store.
96 CHAPTER 7 Windows 10 networking