In the past, we had used tools such as
Fiddler and
Wireshark to analyse the network traffic between clients and servers. But these tools need to be installed on the machine and within corporate networks, this would entail taking proper Infosec approvals.
If you are looking for a nifty network traffic capture tool that does not need installation - then '
TcpCatcher' is a good option. This is a simple jar file that can run on any m/c having Java.
Whenever we are using such proxy tools, we have two options -
1. Change the client to point to the IP of the tool, instead of the server. The tool would then forward the request to the server. (Explicit man in the middle)
2. Configure the tool IP as a proxy in your browser. (Implicit man in the middle)
Update: 25May2016
The TcpCatcher jar tool started behaving strangely today with an alert stating - "This version of TcpCatcher has expired. Please download the latest version". We had the latest version, but looks like this is a bug in the system.
We moved on to use
Burp Suite free edition. This tool is also available as jar file and can run on any machine having Java. There is an
excellent article by Oleg Nikiforov that explains how to setup burp proxy and use it to intercept all http requests. You can also download their root certificate and install it in your machine or mobile phone to log all HTTPS traffic.
We could setup Burp in under 20 mins to monitor all HTTPS traffic between our mobile apps and APIs.