Writing network proxies for development purposes in C#

If you are developing, testing, or supporting web applications, you probably encounter situations when you need to record or modify HTTP traffic. Quite often, the browser request viewer might be enough, but what if you need to modify the traffic on the fly? Another challenging task is testing how your application behaves when put behind a load balancer or an edge server. There are many great HTTP proxies available in the market, including mitmproxy, Burp Suite, or Fiddler and they may be perfect in diagnosing/testing your applications. In this post, however, I am encouraging you to write small tools for your specific needs. There are many reasons why you may want to do so, such as the need for complex requests modifications, better control over the request processing, or customizations of the certificate creation. Of course, implementing the HTTP protocol could be demanding so, don’t worry; we won’t do that 🙂 Instead, we will use the open-source Titanium Web Proxy. The code samples in this post are meant to be run in LINQPad, which is my favorite tool for writing and running .NET code snippets, but you should have no difficulties in porting the samples to a C# script or a console application.

TLS 1.2, AES-GCM and .NET network trace

The next exercise on our path to better understand TLS will be a decryption of a network trace collected from a .NET console application. In the last post we examined a simple TLS 1.0 session. Today I would like to focus on the latest version (1.2) of the TLS protocol. The changes introduced by this version (defined in RFC 5246) included: support for authenticated encryption, PRF simplification and removal of all hard-coded security primitives.

Manually decrypting an HTTPS request

Recently I have spent some time on learning the internals of HTTPS. I wanted to know what makes it secure and how the communication actually looks like. Today I would like to show you the steps required to decrypt a sample HTTPS request. Imagine you got a .pcap file recorded by one of your company clients who complains that your application returned 500 HTTP status code with a strange error message. The client forgot to copy the error message but luckily had a Wireshark instance running in the background (I know it’s highly hypothetical, but just close your eyes to that :)) and he/she sent you the collected traces. Let’s then assume that your server has a certificate with a public RSA key and you are in possession of its private key. Finally the client was using a slightly outdated browser which supports TLS 1.0 (though I will inform you what would have been different if it had been TLS 1.2) and does not use ephemeral keys. My main point in writing this post is to present you the steps of the TLS communication. This post is not a guidance on how to create a secure TLS configuration, but a walk-through on how this protocol works and I will purposely use less secure ciphers to make things easier to explain.