My question is: would proxying over SSH running on port 53 have worked? Seems simpler than using Xray.
A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
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Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#32I feel like you have to be brave messing with a plane's network. People tend to get really touchy when airplanes are involved.
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'm pretty "curious" when it comes to public networks. I'll scan coffee shops, stadiums, hotels, bus hotspots, anything I can connect to. Some networks are set up well, others not so much.
I would never in a thousand years run a sweep on an airplane network. That's massively risky, to the point you might never be allowed on a jet again. Anything to do with aviation I am on my absolute best behaviour.
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#33> The only downside was that although we broke through the network restrictions and could access any website, the plane’s bandwidth was extremely limited, making web browsing quite painful. Unfortunately this is also the downside of paying. Many times I have paid for internet, only to find it unusably bad. To be fair, I just flew a transcontinental flight on Air Canada the other day and the wifi was fine.
I’ve been the unfortunate one who paid and endured the slow-barely-usable/mostly unusable speeds. However, that was before the Starlink era. So if you’re gonna pay for WiFi, it’s worth checking if the flight is equipped with Starlink.
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#34> Here we exploited a simple cognitive bias: not all services using port 53 are DNS query requests.
Eh, I don’t think this is a result of cognitive bias. I’m sure the people involved in creating whatever hardware or software is running the network know that you can run other stuff on ports. More likely the extra effort involved in inspecting packets was not deemed worth the risk, a decision either made by the manufacturer of the hardware/software, or someone on Air Canada‘s IT team.
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#35AC offers free WhatsApp, iMessage, messenger in most flights. You can ask meta through WhatsApp to effectively browse the net :)
Ah "network neutrality", how you won initially yet lost over time...
I mean, if everyone was watching 4k YouTube videos they probably couldn’t support it, right?
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#36> We affirm our strict adherence to all relevant regulations and service terms throughout this project. Except if you bypassed payment and used the service in a manner that was not intended, most likely you were by definition not undertaking "strict adherance" to service terms ?
Say you're on a plane from Canada to Hong Kong (random example), which country's laws would be applicable here? The country where the airplane is registered?
Same country that would be responsible if you stab your seat neighbor for taking too much space I‘d guess.
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#37Why does Air Canada charges $30 for internet, that's brutal. Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo.
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#38Earlier 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'm pretty "curious" when it comes to public networks. I'll scan coffee shops, stadiums, hotels, bus hotspots, anything I can connect to. Some networks are set up well, others not so much. I would never in a thousand years run a sweep on an airplane network. That's massively risky, to the point you might never be allowed on a jet again. Anything to do with aviation I am on my absolute best behaviour.
Without commenting on the appropriateness of what they did, the author doesn't say they did anything like a sweep. It looks like they were manually poking a few things with dig and ping, not firing up nmap.
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#39If a ping to a specific IP times out, I wouldn't say the IP is blocked. It could be that ICMP specifically is blocked, following some network rules on the firewall. This is pretty common in entreprise networks to not allow endpoint discovery. I could be missing something and happy to be corrected here, but I was surprised to read that.
I find it's important to remember, too, that a failed PING tells you nothing other than your echo request did not receive a response. If the remote host received your request, and if it responded, are both things a failed PING can't tell you, because both of those things could be true but you still end up with a failed PING.
I've seen technicians get tripped up in troubleshooting thinking that a failed PING tells them more than it does. When the possibility of asymmetric return paths is involved it's always important to remember how little a failed PING actually tells you.
Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
#40AC offers free WhatsApp, iMessage, messenger in most flights. You can ask meta through WhatsApp to effectively browse the net :)
Many years ago, some dial-up providers in my city offered free public logins to use their websites (for scratch card activation, account renewal, user guides, and so on). Some companies also paid ISPs to have their sites and services accessible in similar fashion for promotional reasons.
At a certain provider, all those free logins used the same firewall configuration to only allow traffic to those free services and ISP site, probably for simplicity, so all of them were accessible with any promotional login. Most of them were not useful (to me), but different agreements with ISP resulted in different call time limit until hang-up, 10-15 minutes instead of 3-5.
However, the main treasure was the addition of external page translation service as a feature on some big site. Back then, it was strictly static and server-side, URL in request gave you its HTML source with translated text strings and absolute paths to external resources, so in order for translation to work, users needed to be able to access that third party server, too. Obviously, if you gave it any other URL, the server would also grab it to translate (and choosing least similar language in parameters would leave most of the page text intact).
You can imagine that having a browser supporting tabs and switching media off was very handy for loading as many free web pages in text only form as those dial-up sessions allowed.
Obviously, WWW-to-email services for people who only paid for mail server access had existed even before that.