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WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

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Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#611

Post by josh_carterPDX »

cromka wrote: post #531
josh_carterPDX wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be an app that would scan the ip and mac addresses on the network that were already connected to the internet. You could then change your settings to one of the mac addresses and when they were done you'd get the connection to yourself. I used to travel a lot for work and just refused to pay for WiFi. This was good in airports and coffeeshops when you still had to pay to connect. Now it's hardly needed,…

It’s not an app, per se, but a concept of setting your WiFi card into monitor mode and listening to the radio traffic. Kismet is one of the suites that does that.

True. I just can't recall the name of the platform I used, but it was something similar to an ip address scanner which gave me a list of all devices already connected to the network along with their mac addresses.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#612

Post by cxcorp »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #438
cxcorp wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the captive portal just had a link (or on an IFE screen, a QR code) that connected your phone to a different, WPA2/WPA3 protected, hidden WiFi SSID that was generated exclusively for you? Phones nowadays support joining a passphrase protected WiFi AP via a QR code, so I'd imagine that's doable. The hard part would be finding routers that support >300 different hidden SSIDs, but honestly I would hope that that…

So you just take a photo of anyone's QR code? I'm not sure the hidden SSID achieves anything, that is presumably plaintext in the wi-fi transmission?

The hidden SSID stops the users' WiFi list being full of random, password protected SSIDs when they just want to connect to the open portal WiFi.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#613

Post by aftbit »

inopinatus wrote: post #516
hattmall wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plane has a transponder that reports this information to the ground, ATC, other aircraft etc. The infotainment server has a receiver that gets this data. Or in some cases they instead pull it from a ground based service via the internet. The transponder is not able to receive signals, so it is air gapped.

A quick review of published information reveals this claim as false. A typical airliner FMS feeds information to IFE via gateway devices. The integration is intended to be one-way. Airgapped they are not. Such analytical delusions are the first step on the road to failing to adequately mitigate threats. As practiced by “it can’t happen here” school of fucking up. Fortunately, it seems far more likely that aircraft sy…

Documentation please?

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#614

Post by aftbit »

hackmiester wrote: post #281
naikrovek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the airline industry is nowhere nearly as stupid as the software industry with things like this. the communication between plane and wifi/entertainment system, if there is any, is almost certainly one-way. likely, the wifi system providing this info is receiving data from the flight systems and repeating it or transforming it a bit and providing that. it would not surprise me at all if the flight attendants have to p…

If the latter was true, then "wheelWeightState" (and others) would not work. But, they do work.

The weight-on-wheels switch reports its in-the-air status over ADSB. It errs in the direction of assuming in-the-air, which was implicated in a near miss on the ground in 2020 between two Air Canada flights[1][2]

1: https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/2020/A20...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj7nG6gJqsU

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#615

Post by mulmen »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #573
mulmen wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming at this another way: The blog says the destination was Oakland. The Oakland International Airport is at 37°43′17″N 122°13′15″W. The data packet also contains the current lat and long of the flight as 40.201 and -100.755 respectively. Plugging that in to a distance calculator [2] gives 1163 miles, 1010.6 nautical miles, or 1871.6km. So the distance value of 1167 appears to be miles. At 487mph covering 1163 mile…

You have to descend and wait for landing clearance when you approach the airport, adding track miles. The two units are confusingly close to each other though.

The plane is probably following a flight path and not an actual straight line as well.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#617

Post by jrockway »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #563
jrockway wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule is probably something like "if !paid: deny tcp 80, deny tcp 443". (Hopefully they got UDP for HTTP/3.) I suppose this has the desired effect of captive portals (break GMail until you pay), without having to field support requests from geeks ("I paid but SSH doesn't work, refund me"). I think their plan is that whatever obscure app you're using negotiates over HTTPS, but then actually transfers the data over…

Whoever set that up probably wanted it for their own use, both for easily managing the system when they need to work on it, and for themselves when they're travelling anywhere. If I'm ever in charge of rigging up a captive portal system like this, I'm certainly going to do something similar if I can get away with it. Maybe even put a hint on how to bypass in the portal's page source. "ssh works on port 46969, don't t…

Honestly, I think captive portals are probably on the way out, given how good 4G/5G is these days. I am not sure what business traveler wants 10kbps hotel wifi for $30/day when their phone gets 600Mbps down and 30Mbps up.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#618

Post by dramm »

jjwiseman wrote: post #459
dramm wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pressure encoders, as I said. That's what feeds all aviation altitude data... i.e. anytime you see the word 'altitude' and its not qualified with 'GPS altitude' which is effectively not normally used. ADS-B Out concurrently transmits GPS height about the ellipsoid data as well as pressure altitude data. No use is normally made of the GPS height data. We are discussing pressure altitude data here, that's what aviation…

Cool, thanks for the info. (BTW I wasn't disagreeing with anything you wrote, I just wanted to mention, since the topic of resolution/accuracy came up, that lots of aircraft broadcast information about the accuracy of some of the sensor data they're reporting, which you can do some pretty cool stuff with. E.g. that's how https://gpsjam.org/ works.)

Oh sorry I did not think you were disagreeing I was just trying to be clear and more trying to clear up the GPS accuracy/reliability metrics like SIL, NIC, NACp and NACv being broadcast by ADS-B being completely separate to anything to do with pressure derived altitude, I was going down a rat hole and had to edit that several times. And it can be painfully confusing e.g. the failure flag for pressure altitude aka baro altitude in ADS-B speak failure is called NICbaro but has no relationship to the GPS NIC (Navigation Integrity Category) value. And depending on the system some of the GPS accuracy/reliability metrics are just hard coded, and the ones that really matter like NACp are derived from the GPS and SBAS reception.

John Wiseman does great stuff with ADS-B Out data.

Also for pilots/aircraft owners/A&Ps: The FAA PAPR (Public ADS-B Performance Report) https://adsbperformance.faa.gov/PAPRRequest.aspx provide a summary of their aircraft's ADS-B performance, including all the broadcast GPS quality metrics and any reported failure flags etc. The PAPR system will email out the PDF report. The owner/pilot/A&P can reply to that email and request a Google Earth/kmz and Spreadsheet/CSV data for that flight showing all the received ADS-B transmissions including all those accuracy/reliability metrics. Interesting stuff and very useful for diagnosing problems with ADS-B Out installations. So sensitive you'll might see say NACp degrade as an aircraft banks steeply because the GPS antenna now has a view of fewer GPS satellites. Installations in most (non-experimental/non-light sports) aircraft effectively require use of PAPR to formally validate a new installation is working correctly. It's a good thing for owners to also just periodically check their aircraft's ADS-B performance using PAPR. I suggest just before and after each annual inspection for GA/light aircraft.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#619

Post by nerdbert »

dangus wrote: post #561
nenaoki wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's responding to the scenario described in GGP.

Ah, does that hack still work though? I would be surprised if it did, since the story was from years ago.

I used to play with IP-over-DNS, which more or less worked on an awful lot of these plane wifi systems. Haven't tried it in the past couple years though; it's always slow the point of barely being usable. You can probably get your mail via IMAP if you're patient and nobody's sending you large attachments, that's about it.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#620

Post by nerdbert »

chankstein38 wrote: post #312
kxrm wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I was on a Southwest flight and had OpenVPN running because I forgot to turn it off. I was able to access the Internet through my tunnel without paying for access. I guess at the time they were only port blocking common ports (80, 443, 53 etc) if you didn't pay. They have since closed that hole.

For this same reason you used to be able to send messages via platforms like whatsapp without internet as well! I don't remember the airline I just remember I hadn't paid for internet but I could message and do a few other things but I couldn't browse the internet.

KLM and United for sure have free in-flight messaging (at least as of a few days ago, the last time I used them).

It's interesting what does and doesn't go through. e.g. Facebook notifications update, but not the content. I guess that's because they use the same channel as FB Messenger.

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