A city’s public downtown Wi-Fi team wants guests to connect without a shared passphrase, but they refuse to leave the lobby SSID as plaintext open air. Which modern secure technology should the technician prefer when the platform supports it?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Open SSID does not have to mean everyone can sniff your traffic. OWE is the modern “encrypted open” path—no shared PSK on a flyer, still better than naked open. WEP, short guest PSKs, and MAC lists are the wrong tools for public city Wi-Fi.
Full Explanation
Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE) provides encryption for open/public SSIDs without requiring a shared passphrase, improving on classic plaintext open networks when supported. Public municipal deployments should prefer OWE (or other appropriate public controls such as captive portals and segmentation) over WEP, weak shared PSKs, or MAC filtering as a substitute for encryption.