Monitor network activity of specific program - proxy

I have a program that I'm trying to reverse engineer.
It gets a specific key by using HTTP GET on some URLs.
I need to figure out the details on how this works.
The good news is that there's the option to preform these requests over an HTTP proxy.
Would anybody know of a program to monitor a specific application's network traffic?
I've tried Wireshark, but its no giving me enough information (Headers, URL path).
After Wireshark, I tried FreeProxy. The problem with FreeProxy is that it only gives headers for around 1/3 of the requests and it doesn't give the full path either.
Could anyone suggest a better alternative for monitoring the internet activity of my application?

I thought Wireshark was able to capture the full packet with all its content? If so, how can it not give you enough information? Maybe you need to revise your traffic capture config?
It's been a while since I used Wireshark, but if you have trouble capturing full packets, what you can do is use tcpdump to capture and write to file, then view the capture file using Wireshark. tcpdump's -s option will allow you to set the packet size so as to capture full packets.

I use Fiddler for all my HTTP traffic monitoring. It is very powerful and displays data in the HTTP layer only. Wireshark will get all of your data, but it displays the details at a much lower layer. It even has capability to decrypt SSL traffic.
Fiddler installs itself as a proxy, and configures IE and FF automatically to use it when it is on. If you are having too much traffic mix in, then you can install Fiddler on a remote box, and point your proxy to that IP address.

I was recommemded another program called "mitmproxy" which worked perfectly for what I needed. Fiddler also worked, but SSL was giving me problems.

Related

931107 - configuring squid

i'm too beginner in squid. i want a way to remain anonymous over the net. i also want to be able to access the contents of the internet which are filtered. my Windows computer is beyond firewall (filtered). my server (CentOS 5) is not. for example, when i enter http://facebook.com in the browser url, it redirects to an intranet ip which tells me to avoid going to this site!
now i've installed squid on server and traffic is propagated through this server. but this redirection occurs. so still i can't open filtered sites.
what can i do? a friend of mine told that the only way is to use https. ie. the connection between browser (Firefox) and the server must use this protocol. is it right? and how can i do that?
what's your suggestion? i don't want necessarily to use squid. besides, https protocol gets banned or decreased in speed in my country sometimes. so i prefer the protocol remain http. i thought also about writing a code in client and server to transform, compress/decompress and packetize as hoax binary http packets to be sent as much speed and success as possible. but i'm not an expert in this context and now i prefer more straightforward ways.
i respect any help/info.
I assume you are located in Iran. I would suggest using TOR if you mainly access websites. The latest release works reasonably well in Iran. It also includes an option to obfuscate traffic so it is not easily detectable that you are using TOR.
See also this question: https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/1639/using-tor-in-iran-for-the-first-time-user-guide
A easy way to get the TOR package is using the autoresponder: https://www.torproject.org/projects/gettor.html
In case the website is blocked, it works as follows:
Users can communicate with GetTor robot by sending messages via email.
Currently, the best known GetTor email address is gettor#torproject.org.
This should be the most current stable GetTor robot as
it is operated by Tor Project.
To ask for Tor Browser a user should send an email to GetTor robot
with one of the following options in the message body:
windows: If the user needs Tor Browser for Windows.
linux: If the user needs Tor Browser for Linux.
osx: If the user needs Tor Browser for Mac OSX.

How can web requests be made and go undetected by a packet sniffer tool like Charles?

I am using a third party (OS X) tool to help me process OFX financial data. It works, but I am interested in knowing what exactly is going on behind the scenes to make it work (the structure of the HTTP requests).
I setup Charles as an SSL proxy for all traffic in hopes that I could observe the requests being made by this tool, but the program runs and Charles gets nothing. No requests show up whatsoever. How is that possible? Is there something I am not understanding about how Charles or other packet sniffing tools work? What are some ways that web requests could be made that wouldn't show up in a tool like Charles?
Charles is not a packet sniffer. It's a proxy. The app initiating the connection has to "voluntarily" use the proxy for the proxy to see anything. If an app uses a high-level networking API like NSURLConnection then it will, by virtue of the frameworks, automatically pick up the system-wide proxy settings and use the proxy. If, instead, the app wrote their networking using low-level socket API, then they will not end up going through the proxy unless they specifically re-implement that functionality.
If you want to see everything, you will need a real promiscuous-mode packet sniffer, which Charles is not. Unfortunately, using a "real" packet sniffer will just show you the gibberish going over the wire for SSL connections, so that's probably not what you want either. If an app has "in-housed" its SSL implementation and is not using a properly configured system-wide proxy, sniffing its traffic unencrypted will be considerably harder (you'll probably have to use a debugger or some other runtime hooking approach.)

Filter traffic using wireshark's display filters

I am learning Wireshark as part of a course. I would like to know how to use the wireshark display filters for filtering traffic of a particular application. I tried using the display filter reference for Skype present on the link below:
https://www.wireshark.org/docs/dfref/s/skype.html
However, I am not able to filter the Skype traffic from the capture I have. Can anybody please suggest an approach to filter Skype traffic?
I know how to filter traffic based on the source/destination IP address, protocols but I would like to know how to capture an application specific traffic eg for Skype.
Are there any other tools which would be better in filtering a particular application traffic from a complete packet capture?
I guess in your case there coud be helpfull rawcap.I used it to eavesdrop on my applications.Data captured by rawcap can be opened with wireshark.I was using it on loopback.You shoud be able to listen to skype as well.After you captured enought data close it with ctrl+c if i remember correctly and then open the file you saved all the informations in with wireshark
Skype uses a different protocol nowadays (if you're using a new Skype version). It looks like normal SSL (HTTPS) now. The old Skype dissector in Wireshark is therefore quite useless now.
Try loading the PCAP file into CapLoader and look at the long duration flows (probably to TCP port 443). Select those and export them to a new PCAP file.

How to build local web proxy without configuring the browsers

How does Netnanny or k9 Web Protection setup web proxy without configuring the browsers?
How can it be done?
Using WinSock directly, or at the NDIS or hardware driver level, and
then filter at those levels, just like any firewalls soft does. NDIS being the easy way.
Download this ISO image: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=36a2630f-5d56-43b5-b996-7633f2ec14ff
it has bunch of samples and tools to help you build what you want.
After you mount or burn it on CD and install it go to this folder:
c:\WinDDK\7600.16385.1\src\network\ndis\
I think what you need is a transparent proxy that support WCCP.
Take a look at squid-cache FAQ page
And the Wikipedia entry for WCCP
With that setup you just need to do some firewall configuration and all your web traffic will be handled by the transparent proxy. And no setup will be needed on your browser.
netnanny is not a proxy. It is tied to the host machine and browser (and possibly other applications as well. It then filters all incoming and outgoing "content" from the machine/application.
Essentially Netnanny is a content-control system as against destination-control system (proxy).
Easiest way to divert all traffic to a certain site to some other address is by changing hosts file on local host
You might want to have a look at the explanation here: http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/help/hookup.asp
This is how Fiddler2 achieves inserting a proxy in between most apps and the internet without modifying the apps (although lots of explanation of how-to failing the default setup). This does not answer how NetNanny/K9 etc work though, as noted above they do a little more and may be a little more intrusive.
I believe you search for BrowserHelperObjects. These little gizmos capture ALL browser communication, and as such can either remote ads from the HTML (good gizmo), or redirect every second click to a spam site (bad gizmo), or just capture every URL you type and send it home like all the WebToolBars do.
What you want to do is route all outgoing http(s) requests from your lan through a reverse proxy (like squid). This is the setup for a transparent web proxy.
There are different ways to do this, although I've only ever set it up OpenBSD and Linux; and using Squid as the reverse proxy.
At a high level you have a firewall with rules to send all externally bound http traffic to a local squid server. The Squid server is configured to:
accept all http requests
forward the requests on to the real external hosts
cache the reply
forward the reply back to the requestor on the local lan
You can then add more granular rules in Squid to control access to websites, filter content, etc.
I pretty sure you can also get this functionality in different networking gear. I bet F5 has some products that do some or all of what I described, and probably Cisco as well. There is probably other proxies out there besides Squid that you can use too.
PS. I have no idea if this is how K9 Web Protection or NetNanny works.
Squid could provide an intercept proxy for HTTP and HTTPs ports, without configuring the browsers and it also supports WCCP.

Any way to know the URL being fetched?

I wanted to know is there any way programmatically in win32, where I can get the URL being fetched from browser.
Like for example as we have MIB table, which shows data sent and received from Ethernet card, can we get the URL being fetched from system
Thanks in advance.
This is an IE-only solution, but if you write a browser helper object, it will be notified before IE navigates to a new URL.
There is no simple way to do this. The main problem you will encounter is that each browser on your system will independently connect to a webserver. That's just a straightforward HTTP connection, usually on port 80. The browser will send the URL in an HTTP request, possibly in multiple TCP packets. So, unless you are going to inspect and reassemble those TCP packets, you're not going to get this information. Even if you did, you'd miss out on the URLs of HTTPS fetches (by design).
An easier solution is to set up a proxy, and hope that the webbrowser doesn't bypass it.
You could try using WinPCap, which is what's utilized by Wireshark. What this would allow you to do is put the network interface into "promiscuous mode," and from there you could just look for HTTP traffic. From there, you could extract the URLs that are being requested, no matter which browser's being used.

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