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Charles Proxy now available on iOS
- verelo 9y agoThis is much easier than the proxy option we used to need to go through!
- joshenders 9y agomitmproxy has worked on iOS and Android for years now and is OSS and easy to use
- thisacctforreal 9y agoIt seems to include SSL support as well https://jasdev.me/intercepting-ios-traffic https://jasdev.me/intercepting-ios-traffic
- joshenders 9y agomitmproxy supports TLS just fine. It had a simple setup for installing a root CA in your device.
- webo 9y agoiirc, you have to do additional setup for Android 7+ apps -- installing a custom apk with modified manifest.xml for each app that you want to intercept TLS traffic.
- ReverseCold 9y agoThis runs on the device itself.
- rimliu 9y agoAnd the desktop version allows to intercept the traffic of the machine it runs on. Mitmproxy cannot do that afaik.
- joshenders 9y agoYes, mitmproxy does as well..
- majewsky 9y agoWhat do you mean? This has been working since way before 1.0.
- rimliu 9y agoOk, I need to clarify, I had macOS in mind and this note in the mitmproxy documentation: > Note that the rdr rules in the pf.conf given above > only apply to inbound traffic. This means that > they will NOT redirect traffic coming from the box > running pf itself. We can’t distinguish between an > outbound connection from a non-mitmproxy app, and > an outbound connection from mitmproxy itself - if > you want to intercept your OSX traffic, you should > use an external host to run mitmproxy. Nonetheless, > pf is flexible to cater for a range of creative > possibilities, like intercepting traffic emanating > from VMs. See the pf.conf man page for more. That's for transparent mode only though, maybe that had me confused.
- chrisweekly 9y ago... besides which, mitmproxy (and its partner mitmdump) are scriptable and extensible in ways Charles simply isn't.
- joshenders 9y agoI get the sense the Charles users are just not familiar with mitmproxy. Here’s a guide I wrote awhile ago to get you up to speed: https://gist.github.com/joshenders/2b0dc14c89a8769f64a7 https://gist.github.com/joshenders/2b0dc14c89a8769f64a7
- robterrell 9y agoSure, but (a) this is an on-device app, and (b) some of us have been using Charles on the desktop since before mitmproxy existed.
- olliepop 9y agoCharles can already be used as an http/https proxy on iPhone via https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/using-charles-from-an-iphone/ https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/using-charle... I generally would only be needing to inspect requests when developing at my workstation, so how is this native app providing additional value beyond what the Charles Mac software already provides? Big fan of Charles over here, I just don't understand the use case for the native app.
- dc3k 9y ago>I just don't understand the use case for the native app. I can't use Charles to inspect traffic from my device at work because of network restrictions. Now I can.
- eridius 9y agoYou can't use the Mac app to inspect any requests that go over the cellular connection. Using the Mac app also requires being able to connect to your Mac from your iPhone (in order to use it as a proxy), which is not doable on many setups. For example, at work we use a different wifi network for mobile devices than we do for laptops.
- trevor-e 9y agoStraight from the announcement: "Running Charles on your iOS device means you no longer need to fiddle with WiFi network proxy settings. It also means that you can capture and measure network traffic that goes over the Mobile / Cellular data network. Measuring networking performance over Mobile data is especially important for your mobile apps (as that is how a lot of users experience your app), and it can reveal large or slow requests, as well as opportunities to increase perceived performance by parallelising network calls." AFAIK before this you could only inspect traffic over WiFi connections since you had to set the proxy address via WiFi network settings.
- dorian-graph 9y ago> I just don't understand the use case for the native app. You can watch his presentation [1] (which is linked to in the announcement page that story links to) for a few of the use cases. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWotEyTeJhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWotEyTeJhc
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- evan_ 9y agoI use the desktop product daily so I picked this up. I frequently proxy my phone through my desktop but I figured this would be fun to play with if nothing else. I turned it on for literally one second and the first thing it captured was traffic from an app I used briefly several years ago and not since. Cool!
- manmal 9y agoThat sounds like a great tool for enhancing battery life, if you delete all the „overzealous“ apps. Charles could show a list of recommended apps to delete.
- evilduck 9y agoThis sounds pretty far outside the realm of what Charles does (it's a web dev tool, not a system scrubber). But something like "Little Snitch for iOS" would fit the bill.
- robterrell 9y agoLiterally the same thing happened to me. I am deleting apps aggressively now.
- feelin_googley 9y agoImagine if the user could compile their own kernels for iOS^W^W [edit] that can control an iPhone. She enables IP forwarding in the kernel configuration. Maybe she can also disable some crucial bits for interacting with the baseband. She only wants wifi to work. Then she uses this phone with the custom kernel (phone #1) as a gateway for another phone (phone #2). She can easily block ads and other undesired traffic destined for phone #2, using a variety of methods of her choosing (firewalls, dns, proxies, etc.). She does not use phone #1 for anything other than being a gateway for phone #2. There does not have to be any data of any value to an advertiser generated, sent from, or stored on phone #1 (e.g, logs). It is just a gateway. Cant do this, but imagine if she could.
- Mononokay 9y agoAt that point of paranoia, wouldn't it be better to just compile the XNU kernel for a different brand of phone?
- saagarjha 9y agoYou're free to compile XNU yourself; it's just the part where you load it onto your iPhone that doesn't work.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago...then how does it help that you can compile xnu?
- saagarjha 9y agoUh, you can put it on another phone maybe?
- ktta 9y agoLooks like she wants Android, specifically, something like LineageOS, or even CopperheadOS for better security.
- 9y ago
- nstj 9y agoSucks that more and more 3rd party apps are adding pinning to their code so you can't sniff their traffic. This is a great tool for first party debugging though :) Nice work Charles!
- reagan83 9y agoCan you describe what this means?
- userbinator 9y agoHardcoding the exact certificate they expect, to prevent MITM attacks. Of course, not every MITM is malicious, as this item shows.
- bigiain 9y agoThen Geotrust, in a petulant hissyfit, email ~20,000 of their customers private keys to DigiTrust - and the carefully laid plans of updating the app with newer ssl certs pinned 12 and 6 months in advance of expiry are - ummmm - revealed to be flawed... Hilarity ensues.
- nstj 9y agoWell, the certs don't _have_ to be shipped with the app, there are workarounds to refresh the certs without sending out a whole new app binary.
- bigiain 9y agoYep - but guess what wasn't done in this case... (Yes, this is a still-trying-to-fix-it real world event... Glad it's not my problem, just one I hear about from people I used to work with...)
- jmiserez 9y agoIf you do pinning, you could just as well use a self signed cert for your API and pin that. If your API is not just used for the app, add a private proxy/load balancer that uses your pinned cert.
- Operyl 9y agoWish I could get a more consistent way of intercepting websocket traffic from iOS (specifically, wss traffic).
- evilduck 9y agoCharles for the desktop can intercept secure websocket traffic.
- Operyl 9y agoYes, but the problem with Charles (well, iOS related at least) is that iOS websockets don't go through the HTTP Proxy configured. They're just considered a raw socket. Thus, even on desktop Charles, it's a nogo.
- evilduck 9y agoI don't know about intercepting iOS apps, but I definitely do this exact thing for web app development targeting iPads using Charles for the desktop. Be sure that your default proxy port doesn't conflict with the default WSS port. Edit: for reference I'm on Charles 4.2.1
- Operyl 9y agoIt works in Safari and Webviews, but definitely not in any native apps. That's what I'm referring to.
- miles 9y agoThis is awesome! The first thing I discovered was how much network noise crashlytics.com was causing. Used AdBlock's[0] DNS proxy feature to black-hole the offending domain (they even mention blocking crashlytics.com in their FAQ[1]). Note that both AdBlock and Charlex rely on iOS's VPN feature, and only one can be enabled at a time. [0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579?mt=8https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579?mt=8http... [1] https://www.adblockios.com/privacy/ https://www.adblockios.com/privacy/
- tzahola 9y agoHm, I thought Apple cracked down [0] on VPN-based adblockers. Or is AdBlock running a real VPN? I.e. your traffic goes through their servers. [0] https://www.google.hu/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2017/07/14/apple-ad-blocking-app-crackdown/amp/ https://www.google.hu/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2017/07/14/app...
- hrrsn 9y agoLooks like this app is the one mentioned in that article. They appear to do both Safari content blocking and use the VPN profiles to block DNS requests (as in no traffic hits their servers).
- rem1313 9y agoCould be that Charles itself uses the crashlytics? How to tell which app is it?
- yodon 9y agoGenuine question here: How is it not absolutely terrifying that an iOS App Store app can man in the middle HTTPS communications made by other apps? Is there some way in which this isn’t poking a hole in exactly the sort of security sandbox that iOS tends to be good at? (And yes there probably is some part of what’s going on that I don’t understand, that’s why I’m asking the question)
- simcop2387 9y agoCan't say much about the security, but I suspect it's working by pretending to be a VPN provider and then proxying the traffic. It's then able to install a CA root to generate any certs it needs to MITM traffic. Cert pinning will prevent this from working, but that's the only thing that will.
- yodon 9y agoSupposed sandboxing against malicious apps is precisely why I run iOS rather than Android. I get that Charles isn’t malicious, but what’s keeping any random free game app from doing the same thing? (Again, intended as a real question not a rhetorical one)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cbrevik 9y agoI’d guess App Store reviews stops that.
- gdavisson 9y agoSetting up Charles requires two explicit authorization steps (each requiring passcode/fingerprint/face verification): First, network interception requires adding a VPN config (the dialog warns that "All network activity on this iPhone may be filtered or monitored when using VPN"). Second, SSL MITM requires installing and trusting a root CA certificate (the relevant prompts in iOS are less clear -- they say that the cert will not be trusted until you enable it, but don't explain the implications if you do enable it).
- cbrevik 9y agoI like this a lot, but most of the time I use Charles for more than recording traffic. For example, checking how my apps behaves if I throttle certain endpoints, or rewrite responses. Hoping those features makes it into a future version!
- rimliu 9y agoMaybe it is worth mentioning that iOS has the ability to throttle the network itself—it's under "Settings"->"Developer"->"Network Link Conditioner". There is also a pref pane in Addition tools download for Xcode which allows to do the same on the Mac.
- tomduncalf 9y agoAwesome news. Charles has been such a helpful debugging tool over the years. Less so for web stuff in these days of browser dev tools being so advanced, but the ability to inspect traffic system wide is still really useful outside webdev, and sometimes it can be useful to verify something dev tools tell you. All developers should get this for iOS, it’s bound to be useful and if not it will at least be interesting to see what you’d phone is getting up to online!
- cstrat 9y agoI'm trying to get it to work but whenever I have the VPN enabled all network traffic fails (HTTP and HTTPS). Anyone else have this issue? The website isn't giving me much insight :( edit: I'm on the latest iOS beta. Could that be why? funny that I'm troubleshooting an app which is largely meant for troubleshooting apps...
- theothertom 9y agoI found that it didn't work on WiFi networks that block client-to-client connections, if that gives you any pointers.
- cstrat 9y agoDamn I didn't even try disabling wifi. Yeah it works once I disable it, kind of an important pointer the app could alert users to... I was originally thinking that maybe the MITM VPN IP clashes with my LAN subnet.
- cstuder 9y agoHow widespread is certificate pinning nowadays in iOS apps? Does anybody have any experiences?
- illuminati1911 9y agoI'm working at a European bank in their iOS team. We use cert pinning for all of our apps, but I have never heard or seen teams using it outside of this project. I guess it's mostly used if the application is doing something critical like money transactions etc.
- iampims 9y agoCert pinning seems to be gaining momentum in the US several high profile apps are using it now.
- stef25 9y agoAwesome tool, picked this up immediately. Amazing what things you can discover with it.
- husted 9y agoIt's neat that it works on the device itself, that will come in handy when during field testing. However I'll continue to use wireshark for debugging my network code when at the office.
- nick873s 9y agoIf you are a developer, consider the free alternative https://www.github.com/kasketis/netfox https://www.github.com/kasketis/netfox ;)
- derwildemomo 9y agoCame here to say the same thing: If you're interested in seeing the traffic caused by your own app (and also making that info accessible to other stakeholders during dev time), netfox is the way to go. Super easy to integrate and provides usually enough info. Also no tinkering with the system settings or third party apps required.