Charles Proxy Automation | Hacker News Reader

Charles Proxy Automation

mmazzarolo.com

27 pointsmmazzarolo10 comments

In recent times I've been using mitmproxy ( https://mitmproxy.org/ ) for almost everything I used to do with charles / fiddler back in 2011.

I use this in conjunction with hostapd to run a wifi network off of the back of a raspberry pi bridged to the main router, which lets me decrypt HTTPS traffic transparently when I need to do some serious app debugging. Of course there's still some setup required on the device to trust custom CA but I find it to be easier to configure than Charles.

I played a bit with mitmproxy last weekend (for the first time). I liked it but to me Charles still seems way more accessible. I'm genuinely curious, what did you find easier to configure?

for me it was the easy python plugin api

I really like the hijacking of the mitm.it domain to redirect you to a setup page with the certs and instructions for every platform.

Would it be possible to extend this and run Charles Proxy on a server? I have used Charles to capture mobile traffic and always felt that having a machine running Charles on the same Wifi network as the mobile device was a hassle.

You can extend this over mobile network using VPN.

Device will use internet over VPN and on VPN server you will run Charles to catch everything.

Yeah, seems like you should be able to use the headless mode + web ui to capture, then export for analysis.

You can definitely do this with fiddler. Very nice to use in conjunction with xip.io also

Author here: it's totally doable. Please keep in mind that you won't be able to change settings values at runtime (e.g.: adding new rewrite rules). I tried changing the configuration file but the changes aren't propagated to Charles if it's running.

Charles is available on iOS (and I think Android) and lets you intercept both Wi-Fi and cellular traffic without another machine required.

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