I\'ve been wondering about this scenario for a while but I cannot fully understa

Question

I've been wondering about this scenario for a while but I cannot fully understand how it works.

Say I am sitting in a cafe on my laptop with wireshark, the cafe has an open WiFi connection. Is it possible for my laptop to become a wireless access point (i will call it something similar to the cafe router) but then redirect all traffic going through my laptop to the actual cafe router as my router is not connected to the internet.

This may help:

Normal route: users ---> Cafe AP ---> Internet

What I want to do: users ---> Fake AP ---> Cafe AP ----> Internet

The part I am confused on is how to make my fake AP redirect all traffic to the cafe AP.

Thinking about it, is it possible to connect to the Cafe AP and simply sniff in promiscuous mode to receive packets from all who are connected?

Explanation / Answer

You're looking for "Forward Proxy", but the whole idea is very questionable: most likely you would need two NICs for such task - one inbound and another outbound. I haven't meet a device which would be able to simultaneously be a source of a network and be connected to another on a same network interface.

How is it related to security is also to be determined: if you worry for other person sniffing on you with such scenario: "Don't trust open networks" is rule of thumb and sensitive information just not supposed to be transferred unencrypted even if you're owner of network. If you want to sniff on someone like that. Well, it's really easier to just share your internet connection to anyone, but alsom not advisable as in some countries it is a criminal act.

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