Tethering OS X Lion to Android

I’m currently in Chicago, having just attended the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, where Adam Doupé presented our paper, Fear the EAR: Discovering and Mitigating Execution After Redirect Vulnerabilities. As always, when I’m traveling, the problem of how to connect to the Internet arises. Fortunately, we were provided with Internet access via WiFi in our rooms throughout the duration of the conference, however, now that the conference is over we’ll have to pay for the access ourselves. Hotels, like many airports, charge absurd amounts for Internet access simply because they can. $8 a day for an unreliable and slow connection is typical and is absurd considering I’m already paying $30 a month for an unlimited data plan on my cell phone. Of course I can check my email, read reddit, and maybe look up some places on yelp using my Android phone, however, it is simply more efficient to use my laptop.

Naturally, the obvious solution is to tether your laptop to your phone and if you have an Android phone the process is incredibly simple. In fact, there are a number of pages on the Internet that tell you exactly how to do it. Primarily, there is an Android Forums post from November, 2009 that recommends using an Android application, Azilink, in combination with an OS X application Tunnelblick, and a shell script to configure the tether correctly. There is also a great blog post from March of this year that is a bit more user friendly than the forum post in describing how to tether your OS X machine to your Android phone.

Despite the last guide being fairly recent, it unfortunately is slightly out of date due in part to OS X Lion. The older versions of Tunnelblick seemingly don’t work with OS X Lion, thus an update to a newer version of Tunnelblick is required. The newer version (currently 3.2beta32) of Tunnelblick breaks the shell script that the previous guide uses, thus I am writing this post simply to provide the Internet with an update to that shell script. Please note that everything else mentioned on the blog post currently works as described.

The fix to the shell script is actually really simple, just replace the line shown in the first block of code below, with the line shown in the second:

sudo /Applications/Tunnelblick.app/Contents/Resources/openvpn --dev tun \    sudo /Applications/Tunnelblick.app/Contents/Resources/openvpn/openvpn-2.2.1/openvpn --dev tun \

Finally for your convenience, I created a github gist with the updated shell script. Observant readers will notice that I updated some of the comments in the script. Happy tethering!