Advice on how to create an encrypted public wifi hotspot?

Athenor

I'm kind of caught between a rock and a hard place with one of my clients. I have one manager who is insisting that we put a basic password on the public wifi, and we have a client that finds any kind of passwords as an annoyance.

Personally, I am someone who would prefer that we have encryption on, such as AES. But requiring even a basic password is.. annoying, to say the least.

IS there any way to encrypt traffic like this? I'm thinking something like a sign in/authorization sheet that shows our acceptable use policy, and when they hit accept it negotiates an encrypted tunnel. If this isn't feasible, then I'll bark up some other tree.

Tofystedeth

If I remember correctly, even with a generic shared password, each client generates their own encryption key, so even a network that everybody has the password to is more secure than an open one. On an open network sniffing the traffic is trivial. I'm pretty sure your suggestion is feasible and something that is done a lot of places, but I don't know offhand how to implement it.

Athenor

That's the theory one of my bosses is working on. Going with a password that is the bare minimum to get an encryption going, and then posting that password in waiting rooms. The problem is that we haven't had buy-in from our clients yet, mostly because.. well.. the public isn't exactly bright.

Tofystedeth

I guess I'd hit up the Sysadmin thread in Moe's next. They might have better luck crafting a helpful google search at least. I can only find things for securely logging on wifi while traveling and such. Not making one with an open to secure handoff.