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A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

ramsayleung.github.io

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Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#141

Post by reactordev »

Mattwmaster58 wrote: post #97
reactordev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say this too. I once merely mentioned the words “Heart Attack” on a plane and was kicked off by the flight attendants. No context, they just heard the words and forced me off. There are things that trigger them because of laws and regulations like mentioning “bomb” (even if you’re describing something fantastic). So messing with the gogo flight entertainment is up there with flirting with terrorism cha…

> I once merely mentioned the words “Heart Attack” on a plane and was kicked off by the flight attendants. Well now you have a chance to tell your side - were you merely sitting and just uttered the words "heart attack" for no externally apparent reason?

I had ran to my connecting flight, got on as the doors were about to close up (there were a few people still coming, also running).

I sat down, huffing from the run, I asked the flight attendant for a quick sip of water. I said this:

“Excuse me, sorry to bother you but I just had to run to catch the flight, can I get a sip of water? I’m gonna have a heart attack and die of thirst.” Jokingly but still huffing from the run. The captain heard it. Said a few words to another flight attendant, and off the flight I went.

Hindsight, I shouldn’t have made the comment and should have just gone to the restroom but… lesson learned. Southwest got me on a flight 45 minutes later to get home.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#143

Post by tempestn »

brailsafe wrote: post #131
hluska wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is theft. Stealing is illegal. Giving a blueprint for how you stole is the icing on the prosecutorial cake because you can’t claim lack of knowledge if you create a conspiracy to enable the theft. This may be the dumbest write up I have ever read.

The nature of the non-transaction was such that they were given access to a service that was constrained in certain ways. They used the service, and the constraints that AC technically applied still applied. They used what was available to them under the constraints and weren't required to pay for any other service but the removal of the constraints. I don't see how any theft occurred. Likewise illegality is just a b…

Courts don't tend to be impressed by arguments like this. It was made very clear what was being offered and what wasn't, and technical barriers were even put in place. The fact that the barriers weren't foolproof doesn't give carte blanche to bypass them.

I agree more with your second argument, though that tends to be strained when the exploit is published.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#144

Post by gnerd00 »

thwarted wrote: post #137
cmehdy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company that invented an internal syntax to compile into C++ code, that still relies on c-shell and conventions taken when OS/2 was in use there, and with a web of Jenkins instances and homemade wrappers and DBs to build that stuff. I can safely say that title exists already. And I value my current experience as a humbling example of what is to come as software becomes an older industry, and not just a wo…

The way you describe this system is exactly how I'd describe a system I worked on in the early 90s at PW (before it was PWC).

jenkins did not exist though

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#145

Post by advisedwang »

joshheyse wrote: post #133

I’m guessing the speeds were slow because QOS was limiting the slowed for what was speed to be a chat only connection. What not just spoof the MAC address of “machine” that has paid. I had written a utility that monitors MAC address on the network and tries them each until it finds on that is allowed. Looks like someone released an app to do just that. https://github.com/t-mullen/wififox

They may have been throttled/deprioritized but often the plane just has a really high latency connection. Some in-flight internet is provided via geo-stationary satellites, which has a minimum of 250ms latency. Even when a low-earth orbit satellite is used, I expect they are being back-hauled to the WiFi vendors datacenter before going out to the internet.

When your latency gets in the hundreds of ms, no amount of bandwidth is going to make your internet connection feel snappy. And buffer bloat means even a workload that could theoretically saturate a high latency connection may actually get trashed.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#146

Post by advisedwang »

eps wrote: post #21

"All new is something already known, but well forgotten." Escaping locked down networks by tunneling things over DNS is one of these things. We've used it back in 00's to get out of restrictive hotel networks. Not even WiFi, but the actual wired Ethernet ones.

This isn't even tunneling over DNS. It's literally just a proxy on port 53 which is wide open.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#147

Post by Zak »

anigbrowl wrote: post #118
VladVladikoff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I am a bit confused about posts like this. It’s bragging about breaking the law. There was a particularly bad one a few months ago where a kid had hacked Monster’s employee training site, and was sharing all this internal media in the post. I don’t understand how they don’t end up getting in some seriously annoying trouble with law enforcement. Well I looked it up just now and the post was deleted, I guess maybe…

I wouldn't go as far as 'breaking the law', and I agree with the author that the contractual terms ($31 for wifi) are a shitty offer to a captive audience. But I'm also tired of pseudolegalism being employed as figleaf for bragging about the ability to bypass access controls and presumably making everything run a bit slower for all the other passengers (the author mentions that they gave up using it after a while bec…

Laws penalizing theft of services usually work even if they haven't accounted for the exact manner in which someone might steal the service in question.

The author knew there was a fee for the service; the author devised a way to obtain the service without paying the fee; the author knew this action was not authorized by the service provider.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#148

Post by mixdup »

avidiax wrote: post #139
NoahZuniga wrote: post #109

I'm not following the reasoning here: > Since acwifi.com is accessible but github.com is not, is it possible that the network has imposed restrictions on the DNS server, only resolving domain names within a whitelist (such as instant messaging domains)? > If this is the case, can I modify /etc/hosts to disguise my server as acwifi.com, so that all request traffic passes through my server before reaching the target we…

It could be that they allow any HTTP/HTTPS request that has Host: acwifi.com regardless of whether the IP address destination of the request is valid for acwifi.com. You see these sorts of shenanigans being used to get around country-wide firewalls. Plenty of deep packet inspection is unable to handle edge cases like the "Host:" header being misleading, having it fragmented into two TCP packets, etc. See "domain fron…

it's extremely unlikely that the plane wifi would be configured that way. trying to use a host file to make github.com respond on acwifi.com was definitely a red herring. It led to figuring out 53 was open, but was definitely not how the filtering was working

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#149

Post by nickthegreek »

stackedinserter wrote: post #104
gruez wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo. "Should" in the sense that "everyone should get free food, housing, and healthcare" or that other airlines actually provide it for free? I don't know of any airline that provides it for free, the most is some Asian/Gulf airlines providing "free for 1 hour" or similar. Compared to that, "free texting, unlimited" doesn't seem too bad, considering ther…

"Should" in the sense that they need to provide basic dignity to people on board. Same as toilet and basic necessities like glass of water or very basic meal. Although "dignity" and modern planes can't be used in the same sentence, unless you pay 5x for business class, passengers are humiliated less there at least.

You feel a loss of dignity if you can’t connect to the internet for a few hours for free? But are too cheap to negate that loss for $31?

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#150

Post by varenc »

eps wrote: post #22
VladVladikoff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I am a bit confused about posts like this. It’s bragging about breaking the law. There was a particularly bad one a few months ago where a kid had hacked Monster’s employee training site, and was sharing all this internal media in the post. I don’t understand how they don’t end up getting in some seriously annoying trouble with law enforcement. Well I looked it up just now and the post was deleted, I guess maybe…

> breaking the law Not law per se. More like contractual obligations taken upon by connecting to the flight's WiFi.

If you never clicked "I agree" in the captive portal prompt, and still got free internet via port 53 proxying, could you argue you never broke the contract because you never agreed to the terms? Genuinely curious
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