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Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

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Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#21

Post by tbronchain »

I'm actually surprised simple tunneling is working and they don't have additional protections.

From my experience most of public networks won't let you do much this way. However, it seems it (as most captive portals) has access to DNS servers.

There was this tool people were using to bypass VPNs blocking and throttling in China called kcptun. It was letting you tunnel tcp traffic over udp, then SSL tunnel on top of it. With a server listening on port 53, it was working awesome to avoid QOS and managed to 1- bypass authentication and 2- get absolutely amazing speeds on some airport wifis for example. You probably could do the same with an openVPN on UDP 53.

However, it seems most public wifis are smarter and would blacklist your Mac address if either too much traffic is going through, or you say for too long. You can change your address, but it's not really usable. Still fun though!

Also, it seems most public wifis now do more DPI and they won't let other traffic than DNS go on UDP 53.

This in minds, another one I haven't been looking through much is DNS tunneling - would love to hear anyone's experience about it (I've heard it's very slow...)

Edit: seeing a few comments about the unethical aspect of this. In some cases, it might be. In some others, it is about avoiding a system that tracks you and try to gather and resell as much information as it can about you (it varies a lot according to which country you're in).

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#22

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

gravitas wrote: post #7
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?

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 absolutely circumventing the intended usage of the system.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#23

Post by pessimizer »

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.

I was just bypassing a some trivial key check on the door. To say I was "messing with the door" is FUD, and whether I was breaking and entering is a question for lawyers and a judge.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#24

Post by ThinkingGuy »

xedeon wrote: post #15
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.

How well do you trust that 12 jury members would understand the distinction?

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#25

Post by PaulAJ »

In the USA this would be a violation of the CFAA https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030. Specifically, the router is a "protected computer" and the procedure described here is "exceeding authorised access" because it routes packets around a mechanism that was designed to stop them. Maximum penalty 5 years.

(Some might argue that it was authorised because the computer let him do it. However the CFAA simply doesn't work that way. "Authorisation" is what the designers intended, and the initial paywall made that intention perfectly clear.)

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#26

Post by grepthisab »

xedeon wrote: post #15
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.

No way to convince a jury of this, for real. Not worth the risk of trying to explain the distinction versus being prosecuted.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#28

Post by mightybyte »

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.

IANAL and all that, but my perception is that "hacking" is usually about breaking into someone else's computer / breaching someone else's privacy / accessing data that isn't yours / etc. If that perception is accurate, then I think it's really a stretch to call this "hacking". You're just moving bits around on network infrastructure designed to move bits around. Maybe I'm just looking for a loophole because wishful thinking, but this seems like a decent argument to me.

Now, you could be violating their terms of service. But in this case there may be a good argument that you never accepted their terms of service since you wouldn't have had to click the "accept" button to do what the post describes.

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#29

Post by pritambaral »

ajross wrote: post #11

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…

How is this a crime (in _all_ jurisdictions)? The CFAA is US-only, and few other jurisdictions have as loose terms (or history of abuse) as the CFAA, when it comes to "hacking".

Re: Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi

#30

Post by ajross »

pritambaral wrote: post #29
ajross wrote: post #11

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…

How is this a crime (in _all_ jurisdictions)? The CFAA is US-only, and few other jurisdictions have as loose terms (or history of abuse) as the CFAA, when it comes to "hacking".

It's straight up unauthorized access to a computer system. They tell you they don't allow it and you have to pay for it, the author clearly knew that, and evaded the protections. Cite me a legal environment where that is not a crime.
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