Hi everyone,
I was wandering how to bypass plane limitation on WiFi. Companies are offering free WiFi limited to SMS and WhatsApp. Is there anything available to have a complete internet access without paying their 30$ option ?
Depends how much work you want to do? You could tunnel a VPN over DNS queries, and that usually works in many networks, cuz they still let you look up DNS entries even if they're not routing your traffic
I remember seeing some chatter about tunneling over XMPP. Most plane wifi allows chat protocols, and it should be possible to encapsulate your traffic as ascii text in XMPP packets. You "just" need to set up the endpoints to do the bridging.
Of I were to do it, I'd run a a script that sets up a tun/tap interface that everything else on my laptop will communicate through. This script also connects to my xmpp server at home. Any data coming in on the tun/tap is encoded to ascii strings and sent as chat messages to my xmpp server. The same script can also do the reverse. At home a similar script does, mirroring that on my laptop. Make sure prerouting is set up accordingly in both ends.
From what I've seen on planes, it's mostly down to captive portals using mac addresses to track clients. In theory it should also be able to sneak through by spoofing hardware addresses of someone who's paid for the service.
If it's with DNS, you can just set your local resolver to 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare)
If it's on the port, then you can try tunnelling traffic over port 443 to somewhere that simply relays your traffic onward, like a personal server running SSH on port 443.
If it's on the IP, blocking access to any IPs not in a whitelist of known WhatsApp IPs, you may be SOL.
Didn't Facebook block this by limiting the number of messages you can send in a given time period? I remembering reading something about that, but can't remember the context.
Is it possible? Yes. Is it easy? No. Is it a good idea? No. Will you get caught? Absolutely.
Thinking you could bypass it with a VPN is adorable. For that to work you would have already needed to have HTTP, HTTPS, SSL, etc permissions. That’s all done on the network infrastructure level. You are not getting through without some form of hacking.