What does HackerNews think of poisontap?

I agree. They could and IMHO should have given a disclosure window since there was no evidence of active exploitation.

However it wouldn’t be that difficult to actually execute this attack.

It’s not that difficult to spoof the DNS server or even DHCP responses on public wifi networks (or local LANs). Yes you can setup enterprise networks to detect or block that but plenty of people aren’t on enterprise networks: https://charlesreid1.com/wiki/Ettercap

It’s also easy to stand up wireless SSIDs of common public networks (eg “Apple Store”) and have devices preferentially connect to you if it happens to be earlier in the wifi network order list.

You can also steal all of a machines traffic by plugging a USB network adapter in: https://github.com/samyk/poisontap

Working SSL would prevent all of that auto running a downloaded executable by such a boot chain.

Sounds like Chrome is finally taking steps to combat that, as the post mentions they plan to "Restrict how, and for how long, Chrome stores site content provided over insecure connections"

PoisonTap is a particularly good example of how devastating this type of attack can be: https://github.com/samyk/poisontap

If you have an open browser you can easily get HTTP cookies: https://github.com/samyk/poisontap

Over on his website [0], Samy provides a link to the source:

https://github.com/samyk/poisontap

[0]: https://samy.pl/poisontap/