Can Tethering Be Hacked?

Tethering adds significant costs to one's monthly carrier bill. Is it possible, academically-speaking only, of course, to do tethering for free?

First of all, please be advised that I do not advocate, in this case or any other, doing anything illegal or in any way violating the terms of a cellular service contract, or any other agreement, under any circumstances apart from life-or-death emergencies. Ethical people keep their word and meet their obligations, period.

But smart people also question terms in proposed agreements and smart people always seek the best deal possible. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's irked with $20 (nominally) monthly tethering charges; the cost to the carrier for this service is approximately zero, and this kind of profit-padding charges are, IMHO, just as unethical as stealing. I buy the device; I should be able to use it as I see fit. I pay for the sending of bits over the air; why should my service provider care where the bits come from? So, motivated by a recent discussion with a client and a few others, and again speaking only academically here, is it possible to do tethering without the carrier knowing anything about it? While I can't prove it, I think the answer here is yes.

Tethering is typically set up via a carrier-provided connection manager, such as Verizon's VZ Access Manager. But these are optional; I've tethered, again, experimentally only, from a Linux-based netbook using a little script that sets up the necessary commands to what amounts to a virtual modem, and such worked just fine; no carrier software required. How would the carrier know, in this test case, and again only for example, that the source of the data appearing over the WWAN connection is coming from a USB port? Similarly, apps for tethering over Wi-Fi like WMWiFiRouter also work just fine - although I do not use this one myself, as it only supports WEP, and Farpoint Group's security policy requires WPA at a minimum. Can a carrier tell that one is running such an app? Again, I doubt it. Can a carrier see the other side of a router boundary? Ditto. A mobile device management tool could certainly keep unauthorized apps from running, but these kinds of capabilities are not widely deployed, and certainly not standardized, yet, anyway. And, of course, a locked-down, closed-system product like the iPhone is also by definition secured against illicit tethering.

So - does anyone have a definitive answer here? Good luck getting one out of a carrier. Anybody care to chime in? For a little more on tethering, see here.

• Wireless / Mobile
• iPhone
• tethering
• VZ Access Manager
• WmWiFiRouter