Airtel Secretly Building huge WiFi infrastructure without users knowledge
Airtel Secretly Building huge WiFi infrastructure without users knowledge
Airtel Secretly Building huge WiFi infrastructure without users knowledge
Most of you would have wondering about a WiFi named MGMNT a protected WiFi access point in your phone while travelling or in a friends house.
This is a WiFi generated from Airtel modem (Beetel). Airtel has parterned with Beetel providing free wifi modem to the customers choosing plans above 4 Mbps in various locations.
As a part of Digital India programme under which the government aims to cover cities with population of over 1 million and tourist destinations with Wi-Fi services by December 2015. So telecom providers have huge gain over this project. This project is already initialed by Shri Narendra Modi Prime Minister of INDIA in Delhi Connaught Market.
In this case the idea if generally creating a public wifi system without any infrastructure. actually airtel provides the so called free WiFi modem to customers where the infrastructure is already created with these WiFi modem which has a built in access point named MGMNT
Here Airtel uses a protocol named TR-069. Airtel claims that this is used for automatic configuration suppose if your modem resets. but it is a very rare case where the PPP username along with broadband details is being erased by a modem. Not all the other Broadband Providers in India insist this. but internally airtel uses this TR-069 to modify and view your modem data from their work-centers/data-centers without entering your house. this is a potential hazard where airtel can monitor which device you use because the mac address which is unique for each device is known to the modem and that is shared with airtel using TR-069.
Technically speaking this sounds like a very interesting concept which is going to be introduced. where airtel has no supplementary charges like electricity for their WiFi access points. and they dont need to pay rent. where as in 2G/3G where the mobile towers are being built separately where the electricity has to beard by the telecom operators and the rent too has to be paid. and special maintenance has to be taken care here the consumers are being targeted hosting airtel public WiFi. where consumers bear the electricity charges and may be airtel could provide some offers or discounts as pay off.
Some thing like this could be developed so if you login to that WiFi you might be redricted to their login portal
Most of the consumers have already fallen as a prey where they have purchased this modem signing the terms and conditions. none of us do. :P
Airtel has already secured that MGMNT access point with a password "098765421" which could now be connected with any of your devices. but the net access is restricted. though it is not done fully. as of now when you get connected you get a ip assigned by DHCP server from the model in the same subnet as that of the primary access point of that modem. and using ICMP you can get the servers ip. and ping returns correct server address. Using that TR-069 airtel officials have the ability to change the details for this access point once this system is launched.
And to additional security airtel has blocked the owners from changing details of this MGMNT access point from their router page. though all these settings are being shown but they are being grayed out with the own software developed by airtel for Beetel modem. The beetel modems which was given free of cost include Beetel 450TC1.
actually there was a exploit which was found out earlier to access free internet from airtel broadband customer wifi using MGMNT access point that included a direct access to the wifi page http://192.168.1.1/basic/home_wlan.htm which gave access to modems page directly without any authentication though you need to login to your modem which is commonly know user name as "admin" and password as "passsword" in most of the cases
Wikipedia Page states that TR-069 can be used to transmit "vital data (like user names and passwords)" more could be read about TR-069 here.
Acknowledgement
This is just my study and i have no intention or personal urge with airtel. this is just a means to inform that airtel might have this plans. it can be true case or just a assumption too.
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