Open Challenges for Secure and Scalable Wi-Fi Connectivity in Rural Areas

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 3 Apr 2026] Open Challenges for Secure and Scalable Wi-Fi Connectivity in Rural Areas Philip Virgil Berrer Astillo, Jayasree Sengupta, Mathy Vanhoef Providing reliable, affordable, and secure Internet connectivity in rural areas remains a major challenge. Pay-for-use Wi-Fi hotspots are emerging as a scalable solution to provide affordable Internet access in underserved and rural regions. Despite their growing adoption, their security properties remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a security analysis of these hotspot ecosystems based on Wi-Fi surveys and practical attack validation. We first perform a Wi-Fi survey conducted in two countries, namely the Philippines and India, to understand the deployment and adoption of such systems in practice. Our results suggest that Piso-WiFi pay-to-use hotspots are particularly widespread in rural regions of the Philippines, and that India's PM-WANI initiative is slowly gaining traction. We then perform a security assessment of these deployments and demonstrate two practical attacks: hijacking another user's paid connection; and rogue hotspots. We analyze the root causes of these vulnerabilities, introduce threat models tailored to pay-for-use hotspot deployments, and outline practical security improvements, including a secure caching architecture. Our findings highlight security challenges in emerging rural connectivity infrastructure and provide directions toward more secure and scalable deployments. Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures and 2 tables; Accepted for publication at SPAIC, AsiaCCS Workshops 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.02774 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.02774v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.02774 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jayasree Sengupta [view email] [v1] Fri, 3 Apr 2026 06:34:09 UTC (240 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.NI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)