That’s the sum of it. Like others and I have noted some mobile apps (and Apple phones in particular have their entire OS configured to not trust any intercepted certs when attempting to speak to Apple home base) are prone to using certificate pinning and will reject the intercepted certs regardless of the trust store. It’s mostly beneficial for adjusting the browser.
If I might ask, what’s the purpose of this proxy? Functionally there are a lot simpler and more efficient ways to block traffic from a phone. If it’s more for traffic inspection I’ve seen a couple VPN based pcap apps for Android that could get a lot more detail while a DNS filter could both control and give visibility to traffic from the device without all the cert hassles.
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 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 11 months ago
play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.greyshi…
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.
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 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