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Reverse Engineering Native Apps by Intercepting Network Traffic

nickfishman.com

1–10 of 76 posts

Re: Reverse Engineering Native Apps by Intercepting Network Traffic

#4
post #2

Isn't it possible for apps for ignore the OS's proxy settings and make a direct TCP connection? In that case the proxy man-in-the-middle trick won't work.

At least on Android you can generate a fake VPN-esque connection locally that passes everything through a proxy, so the proxy isn't exposed to the application

Re: Reverse Engineering Native Apps by Intercepting Network Traffic

#9
I had to do this recently and found a great tool for Android for sniffing traffic on the device called Packet Capture. It can even sniff SSL without root permissions by installing a self-signed certificate and running an in-app local VPN proxy. It also had a bunch of other nice features like parsing common protocols, showing the good bits of HTTP, etc. Much nicer than the approach described here (this article is from 2013), although it's certainly only for Android folk.

I don't think it's FOSS, but hopefully a FOSS alternative will come along and use this approach.

Re: Reverse Engineering Native Apps by Intercepting Network Traffic

#10
post #2

Isn't it possible for apps for ignore the OS's proxy settings and make a direct TCP connection? In that case the proxy man-in-the-middle trick won't work.

Yes. Socket programming. A number of banking apps in the UK use the connect(2) etc, although I can't say if this is the reason. It's most likely to make it a touch more difficult to reverse than hooking NSURLConnection etc.
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