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authorMaximilian Hils <git@maximilianhils.com>2014-09-07 00:42:25 +0200
committerMaximilian Hils <git@maximilianhils.com>2014-09-07 00:42:25 +0200
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+Mitmproxy comes with several modes of operation, which allow you to use mitmproxy in a variety of scenarios.
+This documents briefly explains each mode and possible setups.
+<hr>
+Mitmproxy has four modes of operation:
+<ul>
+ <li>Regular Mode (this is what you get by default)</li>
+ <li>Transparent Mode</li>
+ <li>Reverse Proxy Mode</li>
+ <li>Upstream Proxy Mode</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>Now, which one should you pick? Use this flow chart:
+</p>
+
+<img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-flowchart.png')!@"><br><br>
+
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>Regular Proxy</h1>
+</div>
+
+Mitmproxy's regular mode it the most simple one and the easiest to set up.
+
+<ol>
+ <li>Start mitmproxy.</li>
+ <li>Configure your client to use mitmproxy. This means that you either adjust the proxy setting of your local browser
+ or point an external device to your proxy (which should look like
+ <a href="@!urlTo('screenshots/ios-manual.png')!@">this</a>).</li>
+ <li>Quick Check: You can already visit an unencrypted HTTP site over the proxy.</li>
+ <li>Open the magic domain <strong>mitm.it</strong> and install the certificate for your device.</li>
+</ol>
+
+<div class="well">
+ <strong>Heads Up:</strong> Unfortunately, some applications prefer to bypass the HTTP proxy settings of the system -
+ Android applications are a common example. In these cases, you need to use mitmproxy's transparent mode.
+</div>
+
+<p>If you are proxying an external device, your network will probably look like this:</p>
+<img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-regular.png')!@">
+<br><br>
+<p>The square brackets signify the source and destination IP addresses. Your client explicitly connects
+ to mitmproxy and mitmproxy explicitly connects to the target server.
+</p>
+
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>Transparent Proxy</h1>
+</div>
+
+When a transparent proxy is used, traffic is redirected into a proxy at the network layer, without any client
+configuration being required. This makes transparent proxying ideal for those situations where you can't change client
+behaviour. The basic principle is that mitmproxy sits somewhere on the line from the client to the internet and
+transparently intercepts the request. In the graphic below, a machine running mitmproxy has been inserted between
+the router and the internet:
+
+<a href="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-1.png')!@">
+ <img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-1.png')!@"></a>
+<p>The square brackets signify the source and destination IP addresses. Round brackets mark the next
+ hop on the <strong>Ethernet</strong>/data link layer. This distinction is important to make: When the packet arrives
+ at the mitmproxy machine, it must still be addressed to the target server. In other words: A simple IP redirect on
+ the router does not work - this would remove the target information, leaving mitmproxy unable to
+ determine the real destination.
+</p>
+<a href="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-wrong.png')!@">
+ <img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-wrong.png')!@"></a>
+
+<h2>Common Configurations</h2>
+
+The first graphic is a little bit idealistic: Usually, you'll have your local wireless lan network and no
+machines between your router and the internet. Fortunately, there are other ways to configure your network:
+(a) Configuring the client to use a custom gateway/router/"next hop", (b) Implementing custom routing on the router
+or (c) setting up a separate wireless network router which gets proxied.
+There are of course other options, but we'll look at these three. In most cases, setting (a) is recommended due to its
+ease of use.
+
+<h3>(a) Custom Gateway</h3>
+
+<p>Looking at your local home network, it's clear what happens if you enter "example.com" into your address bar: After you
+press enter, your OS sends a packet to your router, which then sends this to your ISP, which then sends it to some
+Tier-1 carrier, which then sends it... I think you get the idea. The important part for us is the first step here:
+Your machine is configured to use your router as the next hop. Your router certainly doesn't host example.com, but your
+machine knows that your router will forward it upstream. On the technical level, your router probably provides a DHCP
+server, which instructs all clients to use his address as the <em>Default Gateway</em> for connections that leave the
+current subnet (your local network).</p>
+<p>
+How does this help us? Here comes our trick: By configuring the client to use our machine as its Gateway, all traffic
+will be sent to our machine, which then forwards it to the router. This provides us with the scenario we'd like to have,
+namely packets on our doorstep that are addressed for someone else:
+</p>
+<a href="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-2.png')!@">
+ <img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-2.png')!@"></a>
+
+Given this concept, we can set up mitmproxy:
+<ol>
+ <li>Configure your proxy machine for transparent mode.<br>You can find instructions
+ in the <em>Transparent Proxying</em> section of the mitmproxy docs.</li>
+ <li>Configure your client to use your proxy machine's IP as the default gateway. This setting is usually called
+ <em>Standard Gateway, Router</em> or something along these lines
+ (<a href="@!urlTo('screenshots/ios-gateway.png')!@">iOS screenshot</a>).</li>
+ <li>Quick Check: You can already visit an unencrypted HTTP site over the proxy.</li>
+ <li>Open the magic domain <strong>mitm.it</strong> and install the certificate for your device.</li>
+</ol>
+
+<div class="well">
+ <strong style="text-align: center; display: block">Troubleshooting Transparent Mode</strong>
+ <p>Wrong transparent mode configurations are a frequent source of
+ error. If it doesn't work for you, try the following things:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>Open mitmproxy's event log (press `e`) - can you spot clientconnect messages?
+ If not, the packets are not arriving at the proxy. A common source is the occurence of ICMP redirects,
+ which means that your machine is telling the client that there's a faster way to the internet by contacting
+ your router directly (see the <em>Transparent Proxying</em> section on how to disable them). If in doubt,
+ <a href="https://wireshark.org/">Wireshark</a> may help you to see whether something arrives at your machine
+ or not.
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ Have you explicitly configured an HTTP proxy on your device? You do not need mitmproxy's transparent mode
+ then, just start mitmproxy normally. Explicitly setting a proxy and transparent mode contradict each other,
+ settle for one. Do not explicitly redirect traffic to mitmproxy anywhere except for the Gateway setting.
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ Re-check the instructions in the <em>Transparent Proxying</em> section. Anything you missed?
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ If you encounter any other pitfalls that should be listed here, please let us know!
+</div>
+
+<h3>(b) Custom Routing</h3>
+
+Custom routing is a fairly advanced setup which we'll only document briefly here.
+First and foremost, it usually requires root on your router. The basic idea is to teach your router a custom routing
+table that says "for requests from ip X, the proxy machine is the next gateway".
+
+<a href="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-3.png')!@">
+ <img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-transparent-3.png')!@"></a>
+
+For this setup, we expect you to have a basic understanding of networking in general. In short, you should get started
+with <a href="@!urlTo('custom-routing.txt')!@">these routing commands</a>. The Troubleshooting part directly above this
+section might be helpful for you as well.
+
+<h3>(c) Separate Network</h3>
+
+Setting up a separate network using a cheap router might be a viable option, too. Such a configuration mostly resembles
+the idealistic graphic from the beginning (Variant 1). Take a look at the
+<a href="@!urlTo('tutorials/transparent-dhcp.html')!@">Transparently proxify virtual machines</a> tutorial to see how
+such a network could be implemented. The troubleshooting section for custom gateways may be helpful for you, too.
+
+
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>Reverse Proxy</h1>
+</div>
+
+Mitmproxy is usually used with a client that uses the proxy to access the Internet. Using reverse proxy mode, you can
+use mitmproxy to represent a server:
+
+<a href="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-reverse.png')!@">
+ <img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-reverse.png')!@"></a>
+
+There are various use-cases:
+<ul>
+<li>
+ Say you have an internal API running at http://example.local/. You could now setup mitmproxy in
+ reverse proxy mode at http://debug.example.local/ and dynamically point clients to this new API endpoint,
+ which provides clients with the same data and you with debug information. Similarly, you could move your real server
+ to a different ip/port and setup mitmproxy at the original place to debug all sessions.
+</li>
+<li>
+ Say you're a web developer working on example.com (with a development version running on localhost:8000).
+ You can modify your hosts file so that example.com points to 127.0.0.1 and then run mitmproxy in reverse proxy
+ mode on port 80. You can test your app on the example.com domain and get all requests recorded in mitmproxy.
+</li>
+<li>
+ Say you have some toy project that should get SSL support. Simply setup mitmproxy with SSL termination and you're
+ done (<code>mitmdump -p 443 -R https2http://localhost:80/</code>). There are better tools for this specific task (we don't
+ have C performance obviously), but it's definitely a nice and very quick way to setup an SSL-speaking server.
+</li>
+<li>
+ Want to add a non-SSL-capable compression proxy in front of your server? You could even spawn a mitmproxy instance
+ that terminates SSL (https2http://...), point it to the compression proxy and let the compression proxy point
+ to a SSL-initiating mitmproxy (http2https://...), which then points to the real server. As you see, it's a fairly
+ flexible thing.
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>
+Please note that cloning Google by using <code>mitmproxy -R http://google.com/</code> does <em>not</em> really work
+(as in <a href="@!urlTo('screenshots/ios-reverse.png')!@">this screenshot</a>).
+This may work for the first request, but the HTML remains unchanged: As soon as the user clicks on an non-relative URL
+(or downloads a non-relative image resource), they speak with Google directly again.
+</p>
+<p>
+ On another note, mitmproxy either supports an HTTP or an HTTPS upstream server, not both at the same time. You can
+ simply work around this by spawning a second mitmproxy instance. Each instance listens to one port and talks to one
+ port.
+</p>
+
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>Upstream Proxy</h1>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+If you want to add mitmproxy in front of a different proxy appliance, you can use mitmproxy's upstream mode.
+In upstream mode, all requests are unconditionally transferred to an upstream proxy or your choice.
+</p>
+
+<a href="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-upstream.png')!@">
+ <img src="@!urlTo('schematics/proxy-modes-upstream.png')!@"></a>
+
+<p>
+mitmproxy supports both explicit HTTP and explicit HTTPS in upstream proxy mode. You could in theory chain multiple
+mitmproxy instances in a row, but that doesn't make any sense in practice (i.e. outside of our tests).
+</p> \ No newline at end of file