You do need write access to /dev/net/tun. This is standard for all users for the distros that I've looked into, but it is ultimately a distro-specific thing.
The downside is this doesn't work with anything not using OpenSSL, there are projects like https://github.com/gojue/ecapture which have interceptors for many common libraries, but the downside is that needs different code for each library.
I think providing a TLS certificate is fine for the use cases of the tool; most tools won't be doing certificate pinning, but ecapture does support Android where this is more likely.
But read and write syscalls are used by the application to do I/O on the sockets before/after the encryption, which can be intercepted. Or you can attach uprobes directly to the TLS library's own functions.
Yes, it's true, actually doing it is hard, but to be honest not as hard as a lot of other stuff (getting a phd for example, or goodness gracious buying a house in San Francisco). I love getting up early. I love living out in nature. I love chanting and eating meals together and making a version of Buddhism for AI systems!
If you're interested in what it's like, we have written a bunch of very short few-paragraph stories about our time at MAPLE here: https://tales.monasticacademy.org/
This seems like the kind of things you can do before you get kids and have real responsibilities. Then you need to get back to reality. Sounds fun though and I would have liked to experience it.
Yeah mitmproxy is great. The main difference with httptap is that it's an HTTP proxy server, so you have to configure your program to use a proxy server. When I wrote httptap I wanted to be able to run `httptap <command>` and see the httptraces right there in standard output. There is an absolute ton of cool things that mitmproxy can do that httptap is not even close to, like interactively modifying HTTP requests and such. Very cool project.
I did try this with firefox but it doesn't work right now due to (I think) the user namespace messing with user IDs. I think I should be able to fix this, though. I will have to try it with other desktop apps soon too...
Yep. This is the first time I've mentioned this but there are actually two implementations of this in the codebase -- one uses gVisor and one is an incredibly bare-bones TCP implementation that I wrote myself in 550 lines of Go code (tcp.go). The home-grown one isn't used by default and it doesn't support much of TCP proper, but it actually works pretty well. You can use it with `--stack=homegrown`.
