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Mobile hotspot - Am I missing something?

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Trip:
I would not root or jailbreak to use wifi tethering on AT&T.  They are checking for wifi tetherers that do not have a wifi tether plan.

If you are grandfathered into an unlimited plan, they will remove you from that plan and put you on a limited plan with tethering for rooting and bypassing their security to use wifi tethering without your approval and then call you and tell you they did it.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/smart_phones/231300341

I am on Verizon though, so my iphone and galaxy nexus are both jailbroken/rooted and I tether like a mad man.

Green Giant:

--- Quote from: Trip on April 17, 2012, 12:21:40 pm ---I would not root or jailbreak to use wifi tethering on AT&T.  They are checking for wifi tetherers that do not have a wifi tether plan.

If you are grandfathered into an unlimited plan, they will remove you from that plan and put you on a limited plan with tethering for rooting and bypassing their security to use wifi tethering without your approval and then call you and tell you they did it.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/smart_phones/231300341

I am on Verizon though, so my iphone and galaxy nexus are both jailbroken/rooted and I tether like a mad man.

--- End quote ---
They are checking for wifi tethers on jailbroken iphones.  Not Android.

Like I said before, they can't figure out if you are doing it on an Android unless you bring them your phone for them to check it.


--- Quote ---I havn't really had a reason to root it yet but maybe someday.
--- End quote ---
Just off hand there are two amazing apps which are what inspired me to root mine in the first place.
One is the free wifi tethering.  The second is titanium backup.  It creates a perfect backup of everything on your phone onto your sd card.  Not a big picture backup but every individual app, phone setting, contact, etc.


--- Quote ---The only thing I'll say is don't assume this.
--- End quote ---
I know for a fact that they can only check for a rooted phone if you physically bring them your rooted phone.  You can't even check for traces of a phone that has been unrooted.


--- Quote ---It's far more secure than your home router.
--- End quote ---
Yeah I was going to say this actually.  When I use my tether I can immediately see who is attached to the network, but I never do this on my home network.

RayB:
How exactly would the carrier detect that you're routing wifi through your phone anyways? Seems to me data you're phone is requesting is data your phone is requesting.  I've used iPhone's hotspot feature exactly 3 times. Just turn it on, it works. It's not something I pay for or get blocked. Maybe it's illegal in Canada for them to be so abitrary about the orgin of a data request.

Trip:

--- Quote from: Green Giant on April 17, 2012, 06:38:41 pm ---They are checking for wifi tethers on jailbroken iphones.  Not Android.

Like I said before, they can't figure out if you are doing it on an Android unless you bring them your phone for them to check it.
--- End quote ---

They can figure it out, just requires them to spend a little more money.  iphone free wifi tether apps are easy and cheap for them to figure out becauce they use different APNs to tether.  The newer version of PDAnet has a hide option to keep the APN the same though.  Basically what Android wifi tether apps do, if AT&T gets bored of cracking down on just the lazy iphone users, they can easily go to scanning for packets and bust you guys too.  Requires a little more money though, so they may or may not g o this route.

kahlid74:

--- Quote from: Green Giant on April 17, 2012, 06:38:41 pm ---
--- Quote ---The only thing I'll say is don't assume this.
--- End quote ---
I know for a fact that they can only check for a rooted phone if you physically bring them your rooted phone.  You can't even check for traces of a phone that has been unrooted.

--- End quote ---

I'm not going to go super deep into this because it's not my specialty but I've built out enough data centers to be familiar with the technology and capable of utilizing it to understand traffic flows and identify malicious/unwanted activity.  You don't check for a phone that's been rooted, you check for the presence of computer browsing or of browsing on a level that is higher than what you would expect from a phone.  It would be the idea of heuristics and behavioral engineering.  One of the ways this can be done is using DPI to examine who/what is reading the packets.  Browser/OS information is easy to extract from packets even if you're using SSL.

I've been inside of many data center including Verizon and AT&T.  They both have several iterations of DPI not including the NSA dark rooms.  If Verizon wants to crack down on tethering they can do so.  The idea that they can't because they currently don't is security theater.

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