A Story About Bypassing Air Canada's In-Flight Network Restrictions
13 hours ago
- #Networking
- #WiFi
- #Bypass
- The author took a 12-hour flight from Canada to Hong Kong with Air Canada, which offered WiFi with restrictions.
- Free Texting was available for Aeroplan members, allowing only messaging apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, and WeChat, but no access to other websites.
- Unlimited internet access cost CAD $30.75, and video streaming cost CAD $39.
- The author wondered if they could bypass the messaging app restriction to access other websites for free.
- With the help of a roommate who is a security and networking expert, they attempted to bypass the restrictions remotely.
- They tried disguising their server as acwifi.com to route traffic, but the IP was blocked.
- They discovered that DNS requests were not blocked, allowing them to use DNS port masquerading to bypass restrictions.
- Using a proxy server on port 53, they successfully accessed github.com and other websites.
- An ultimate approach involving DNS tunneling was theorized but not implemented due to lack of software.
- The author concluded that while they succeeded in bypassing restrictions, the plane's bandwidth was too slow for practical use.