Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

potatofrom.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 239 posts

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#11

Post by ajross »

tl;dr: The Vianet firewall is trying to do filtering of TLS connections based on the arbitrary and client-controlled host name string and not the destination IP address. It has no network-level routing control at all, it will allow a connection to any host on the internet, but will then terminate it after it sees that it's not going to (strictly, "doesn't look like it's going to") a permitted host. So the author set up a ssh server on the HTTPS port and connected to it with a faked host name.

But seriously folks: this is (1) still a crime in basically all jusisdictions and (2) a crime on an airplane in flight, so have fun in jail.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#13

Post by pessimizer »

nawtacawp wrote: post #3

While interesting, I would have an uneasy feeling messing with the WIFI AP on an airplane. Perhaps there is a U.S. law this type of conduct would fall under specific to being on an airplane?

My guess would be that getting caught doing this could get you federal terrorism charges. I don't even think it's a safe assumption that the network is isolated or properly insulated from pilot instrumentation.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#14

Post by gravitas »

behrlich wrote: post #9
gravitas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author does not "mess with the WIFI AP on the plane", they exploit a weakness in the design (failure by viasat to maintain an checksum IP mapping to their domain for the captive service) to simply bypass a trivial TLS header check in order to tunnel their traffic.

This is almost definitely “hacking” under federal law.

The person I'm replying to specifically said "mess with the WIFI AP" in order to present this as harmful or dangerous (FUD), it is not. It's a trivial header check bypass - whether or not that is "hacking" is a question for lawyers and a judge.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#15

Post by xedeon »

nawtacawp wrote: post #3

While interesting, I would have an uneasy feeling messing with the WIFI AP on an airplane. Perhaps there is a U.S. law this type of conduct would fall under specific to being on an airplane?

Please actually read the article. The author did not “mess” with WiFi radio. It was all done on the network layer.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#16

Post by cosmodisk »

nawtacawp wrote: post #3

While interesting, I would have an uneasy feeling messing with the WIFI AP on an airplane. Perhaps there is a U.S. law this type of conduct would fall under specific to being on an airplane?

Was going to write the same. Prosecutors would have easy time convincing judge that hacking+ doing so while airborne should result in many years behind the bars, especially knowing how punitive the legal system in the US can be. The article itself is very interesting though.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#18

Post by behrlich »

gravitas wrote: post #14
behrlich wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost definitely “hacking” under federal law.

The person I'm replying to specifically said "mess with the WIFI AP" in order to present this as harmful or dangerous (FUD), it is not. It's a trivial header check bypass - whether or not that is "hacking" is a question for lawyers and a judge.

Right. I think all he’s trying to say is that it might be worse to hack something on a plane vs some other kind of computer system. I don’t think they were implying harm was being done to the ap. Colloquially I would definitely call this messing with the ap :)

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#19

Post by Pneumaticat »

nawtacawp wrote: post #3

While interesting, I would have an uneasy feeling messing with the WIFI AP on an airplane. Perhaps there is a U.S. law this type of conduct would fall under specific to being on an airplane?

A good point. To be fair, though, even Lifehacker has posted a similar writeup [1] (linked in the article) and I don't think they've been threatened.

Getting caught in the air - now, that's a different story ;)

[1]: https://lifehacker.com/get-free-unlimited-wi-fi-on-flights-a...

Post reply on HN