Could someone explain the networking behind transparent proxies and MiTM snooping using certificates to me? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Hi everyone, I've been trying to understand how MiTM setups like a transparent proxy work.

Obviously, the use-case here is in a personal scope: I'd like to inspect the traffic of some of my machines. I am aware that Squid can be a transparent proxy, and some might use the Burp Suite to analyse network traffic.

Could someone explain the basic networking and the concept of certificates in this scenario? I feel like I don't understand how certificates are used well enough.

For example: I realise that if someone inserts a root certificate in the certificate store of an OS, the machine trusts said CA, thus allowing encrypted traffic from the machine to be decrypted. However, say the machine was trying to access Amazon; won't Amazon have its own certificate? I don't know how I'm confused about such a simple matter. Would really appreciate your help!

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[-] MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Thanks, I didn't realise that certificate pinning was this strict.

This effort is to check if my mobile has a baseband processor that might be communicating with the internet. I want to know if my device has a backdoor in hardware. The idea with a VPN has me intrigued, could you tell me more about that?

[-] ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.greyshirts.sslcapture

Something like that should ship all traffic through a local VPN adapter and output a standard pcap file.

Another option if you have a bit more fancy networking available is to set up a security onion instance, then mirror a port on the network and just capture everything at an on-wire level. That would also cover things beyond just web traffic to catch other things like ssh or whatever other remote connectivity could be in play. Seeing the content of the connection is different than just seeing the connections existence though. The endpoint generally has the best visibility before data gets pushed into a a connection but unless you start getting into kernel level debugging it can still be hard to see into the behavior of internal applications.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.faircode.netguard

This is also a local VPN way of seeing all the outgoing traffic along with allowing control of it as a local firewall.

[-] MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Hi, thanks for the resources. However, I don't think I'll be able to decrypt the traffic from my mobile using this, yes? Using a VPN for this is a great idea though, this also happens to be how NoRoot firewalls work on Android

this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023

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