From https://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/how-to/wp8/connectivity/w...
> Your contacts don't see your WiFi network password.
> When you share network access, your contacts get Internet access only.
How can they ensure these two?
> Your contacts don't see your WiFi network password.
> When you share network access, your contacts get Internet access only.
How can they ensure these two?
Most likely they mean "we disable the show password option".
It is supposed to be impossible to RE the code for anything useful - the keys are encrypted using the public key of the secure enclave. You'd need to break the chip itself to win, and since Intel knows this, we can assume they'll make it incredibly hard.
Of course, since MS wants this to work on current hardware, not "shipping sometime in the future" we can assume they aren't using Intel SGX. But in theory it's fairly strong DRM.
https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/09/26/protecting...
The password is not stored on the devices of the people you share with. It's stored on Microsoft servers. When the device someone you have shared with notices that a network you've shared is available, it gets the key to connect, then presumably forgets it.
I wonder if it is possible to do better? The idea would be that when setting up the connection (so, setting up session keys and authenticating) the device could pass these packet through to Microsoft's server. Microsoft's server could then calculate the response packets and give them to the device to relay to the access point. When the connection set up is all done, Microsoft's server could pass the session key to the device, and subsequent packets would be handled entirely on the device.
There are two (at least) things that could torpedo this kind of approach. (1) the protocols might work in such a way that you cannot hand off the setup/authentication, or they might require frequent enough re-keying that spotty cell access could prevent keeping wifi working, and (2) the connection setup and authentication might be handled in firmware that does not provide a low enough level interface to do the fiddling needed.
Also this entire thing seems dumb. If you need to connect to Microsofts server before you have wifi then you already have data.
So you still need minimal internet connectivity in the first place In order to ask MS' servers? Suddenly sounds less useful for things that aren't phones.