It is often said that you probably should not connect to a public WiFi network if you’re looking to conduct sensitive transactions, such as transferring money or viewing confidential documents. This is because due to the openness of public WiFi, there is a chance of your data being intercepted by hackers.However it seems that researchers at MIT might have come up with a way to prevent that with the creation of a wireless transmitter (via Engadget). Now one of the ways that can help prevent hackers from intercepting data is through a technique known as frequency hopping. This sends data packets over random radio channels, but the problem is that larger packets move slower than the smaller ones, giving hackers enough time to intercept them.
However MIT’s transmitter works by essentially speeding up the process to the point where it is too fast to be intercepted. This is done by bouncing every individual bit at random every microsecond across 80 different channels. Its size and speed means that it would be almost impossible for hackers to keep up.
According to Rabia Tugce Yazicigil, the first author on the research paper, “With the current existing [transmitter] architecture, you wouldn’t be able to hop data bits at that speed with low power. By developing this protocol and radio frequency architecture together, we offer physical-layer security for connectivity of everything.”
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