I have been using mitmproxy over Burp for day to day web app hacking these days. But we still use Burp scanner for lots of chores. I almost always chain through both to then go back in and use Burp features missing in mitmproxy (exploring site contents, etc.). But those are edge cases mostly needed for professional use and not for tinkering.
I just like working in terminal. Some things I can do faster in mitmproxy (filtering with lots of constraints, shooting response or request data to a pipe). It has a mutt like interface so if mutt seems fast and intuitive then mitmproxy will feel similar. I have spent a lot of years thrashing around in the Burp GUI and mostly I don't need all the features all the time :)
Things that are a few clicks in Burp are a few terse keystrokes or key presses in mitmproxy. IDK, give it a shot and see if it makes sense . Most of our team just sticks with Burp FWIW.
This tool recently helped me troubleshoot a bug I was facing and unable to solve due to the lack of Safari's development tools. Here's a link for anyone interested: http://eapen.in/mitmproxy-for-troubleshooting/
one of the best tools for reverse engineering mobile apps.
I'm just having problems when certificate pinning is enabled. Does anyone have an idea (or even a solution) how to deal with that?
Even without certificate pinning, starting with Android 7, you must decompile the app to allow user provided certificates. Or use an xposed module if you have a rooted device.
Also, if the app uses Google signin, you have to be rooted, because play services uses the package manager to check the app signer before giving the app a token.
Same here, mitmproxy was always the goto tool, but many apps now use certificate pinning, which stops it cold.
I was recently wishing for a "Jailbroken Mobile Testing Tool", similar to Sauce Labs or BrowserStack but with jailbroken mobiles -- i.e. a cloud-based service allowing you to remotely control a mobile phone through a web interface. Would that be interesting to have?
This service would allow you to load an app from the App Store / Google Play, and then interact with it while logging all network connections (in tcpdump/wireshark/HAR/etc. format). The controlled mobiles would be jailbroken and have tools like SSL kill switch (as mentioned by @bitexploder in another comment) installed by default.
(Going further: the same tool would allow you to download the phone's storage as a zip archive for further analysis)
It's been a while, but when I have been reversing android apps with certificate pinning in the past, I had the most luck with decompiling the apk with apktool, removing the certificate pinning in the samli bytecode, then recompiling and signing the apk again.
For iOS, I know there are jailbreak cydia tweaks that try to disable certificate pinning, but I have no experience with this.
We deal with this routinely. Solutions tend to vary.
On iOS just use SSL kill switch (if you are jailbroken). If you are not jailbroken you don't have a lot of options. On Android there are some well documented approaches. Usually decompiling the app and adding to the local app's cert store will work and then rearchive and sign it.
Function hooking key network calls can work as well. It is pretty much required that if you want to do serious tinkering or assessment you need a jailbroken or rooted device. This can be a significant effort investment, but once done is generally reliable.
This tool has really helped me on several occasions with a wide variety of issues up and down the stack. Even with debugging web apps because while the chrome Dev tools are awesome they (at least at the time as far as I know) didn't expose the initial headers/network exchange for certain types of auth like NTLM.
Mitmproxy is nice, but I think dev tools have become alot better, I discovered that because my standard work horse Chrome+Wireshark is very fincky with SSL:
The node proxy is really great in that it's fully extensible, allows you to generate certificates, and filter/save the kinds of traffic you get to simple JSON structures. We've found it to be a huge boon in development, but it's clearly inspired by mitmproxy (which predates node), so credit where it's due.
It's Java-based and forked out from some old MITM code from Selenium. It has a bunch of APIs for manipulating traffic, tweaking DNS resolution, rewriting content, etc. Just passing along in case anyone is looking for alternatives.
I was just looking for something like this. Googling led me to Charles proxy, which seems a pretty capable tool, and I'm growing fond of it though the Java UI is jarringly ugly.
Does anyone have any experience with charles vs mitmproxy?
I love mitmproxy, super easy to use (and to install an interception certificate) and the scripting support makes it very useful for pentesting iOS app traffic etc where I can't easily modify the client
That is because there isn't a good solution. You can get away with repackaging an IPA and hand modifying the binary depending on how they are performing the pinning, but it is always going to be time consuming to do it this way. If you are serious about tinkering you pretty much need a jailbroken device, which is getting harder to maintain by the year.
Also, mitmdump is one of the best and fastest ways to get ahold of web requests with Python to modify it on the fly.
http://docs.mitmproxy.org/en/stable/mitmdump.html
I have been using mitmproxy over Burp for day to day web app hacking these days. But we still use Burp scanner for lots of chores. I almost always chain through both to then go back in and use Burp features missing in mitmproxy (exploring site contents, etc.). But those are edge cases mostly needed for professional use and not for tinkering.