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Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

github.com

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Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#2

Post by alexflint »

httptap is a process-scoped http tracer that you can run without root priveleges. You can run `httptap ` where is a linux program and you get a trace of http/https requests and responses in standard output:

    httptap -- python -c "import requests; requests.get('https://monasticacademy.org')"
    ---> GET https://monasticacademy.org/
     GET https://www.monasticacademy.org/
It works by running in an isolated network namespace. It has its own TCP/IP stack (for which it uses gVisor). It is not an HTTP proxy and so does not rely on being configured to use an HTTP proxy. It decrypts TLS traffic by generating a CA on the fly. It won't install any iptables rules or make other global system changes.

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#4

Post by yoavm »

The "How it was made" section of the README was not less interesting than the tool itself:

> The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for the land, maintaining the buildings, cooking, cleaning, planning, fundraising, and for the past few years developing software together.

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#5

Post by sevg »

This looks great!

The GitHub profile points to https://www.monasticacademy.org/about which I have no particular opinion on but it did leave me wondering what the connection is between their monastic training retreat and their projects on GitHub.

Edit: Oh, I didn’t go to the bottom of the readme https://github.com/monasticacademy/httptap?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#7

Post by gear54rus »

alexflint wrote: post #2

httptap is a process-scoped http tracer that you can run without root priveleges. You can run `httptap ` where is a linux program and you get a trace of http/https requests and responses in standard output: httptap -- python -c "import requests; requests.get('https://monasticacademy.org')" ---> GET https://monasticacademy.org/ GET https://www.monasticacademy.org/ It works by running in an isolated network namespace.…

can it modify requests or responses? with the current web getting increasingly user-hostile a need for tool like this was never more apparent

especially if it doesn't require proxy configuration

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#10

Post by alexflint »

tacone wrote: post #6

Whoa, great! Questions: - What's the performance impact? - Does it allow payload/headers inspection?

Thanks!

Haven't measured performance at all. However when I decided on the approach I looked at the performance benchmarks from tun2socks, which uses the same gVisor code that httptap uses, and it seems that pretty great performance is possible with that code. Still need to do the work of actually achieving comparable performance.

Payloads and headers can be dumped with --body and --header respectively. There is an example in the readme of doing this (just search for --body) and I'll work more on documenting this in the coming days.

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