Is there a way to completely encrypt the outgoing HTTPS requests from the software to the server ? i mean there are apps like Charles and Fiddler that can capture the HTTPS traffic and see everything like the Headers,URL,...
i don not want anyone to see or capture the traffic going from my app.
i'm using Delphi 10.1 VCL App
If you're using HTTPS and you are properly validating certificates as a browser would, there is no way for an intermediate to view URLs or headers, or content. All they can see is which server you're communicating with.
The way Charles gets around this is that it presents its own non-genuine certificate, which won't validate, and proxies the communication. If your app is validating certificates it would refuse to communicate with the Charles proxy. If you viewed the Charles proxy with a web browser it would present an SSL certificate error.
If you trust that particular Charles proxy and want to add an exception in your client or browser, you can. But it only allows that particular one - it doesn't mean anyone else can intercept your HTTPS, or read URLs, etc, using their own Charles proxy or similar.
Related
I've got Fiddler to decrypt https traffic. which works just fine.
http://fiddler2.com/documentation/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/DecryptHTTPS
But there are some requests that are shown as "Tunnel to" port 443. Also the protocol of these requests are shown as HTTP instead of HTTPS. I do not see the decrypted content of these requests.
on the response details pane, it's shown as below:
Can someone let me know how I can get fiddler to decrypt these tunnelled requests too. Also appreciate if you could provide me some details about what's going on in this case.
Cheers
As noted in the inspector description the line Tunnel to example.org:443 is the first line of a successful captured HTTPS call.
It is notes as HTTP because at that time the HTTPS channel has not been established yet.
If afterwards no further HTTPS requests to that server are shown this means that the program performing the request has not accepted the presented server certificate generated by Fiddler and therefore the HTTPS requests failed.
There are two possible explanations:
The program performing the requests does not trust the Fiddle root CA certificate.
For programs that don't use the Windows certificate store (e.g. Firefox) you have to export this root ca certificate from Fiddler and install it manually into the program's certificate trusted store (list of trusted root-CA certificates).
A second possibility is that the site is certificate pinned. For web browsers this can happen is the web site uses the HSTS configuration.
I understand that HTTTPS is secured and it requires SSL certificate issued by CA authority to make the application secure. But what I do not understand is that its in-depth difference with HTTP.
My question, as a user, if I make a request to an application with HTTP or if I make same request to HTTPS what is the actual difference? The traffic remains same to both. Is there any traffic filtering happening if I use HTTPS?
Thanks
HTTPS, as an application protocol is just HTTP over TLS, so there are very few differences, the s in the URL and some consequences for proxy, that is all.
Now you are speaking about the traffic and the filtering. Here you have a big difference because using TLS adds confidentiality and integrity: passive listeners will see nothing about the HTTP data exchanged, including headers. The only thing visible will be the hostname (taken from the https:// URL) as this is needed at the TLS level before HTTP even happens, through a mechanism called SNI (Server Name Indication) that is now used everywhere to be able to install multiple services using TLS under different names but with a single IP address.
If a client is requesting a domain that does not have a valid CA signed certificate and the server not intend on supporting HTTPS but does support HTTP for this domain, what is the best way to handle this in the web server. Note, the server does handle requests for SSL (HTTPS) on other domains so it is listening on 443.
Example where this would apply is for multi sub-domains where the sub-domains are dynamically created and thus making it extremely difficult to register CA signed certificates.
I've seen people try to respond with HTTP error codes but these seem moot as the client (browser) will first verify the certificate and will present the hard warning to the user before processing any HTTP. Therefore the client will only see the error code if they "proceed" past the cert warning.
Is there a canonical way of handling this scenario?
There is no canonical way for this scenario. Clients don't automatically downgrade to HTTP if HTTPS is broken and it would be a very bad idea to change clients in this regard - all what an attacker would need to do to attack HTTPS would be to infer with the HTTPS traffic to make a client downgrade to unprotected HTTP traffic.
Thus, you need to make sure that the client either does not try to attempt to access URL's which do not work properly (i.e. don't publish such URL's) or to make sure that you have a working certificate for these subdomains, i.e. adapt the processes for creation of subdomains so that they not only have an IP address but also a valid certificate (maybe use wildcard certificates).
Considering these websites don't have to work with SSL, the webserver should close all SSL connections for them in a proper way.
There is no canonical way for this, but RFC 5246 implicitly suggests to interrupt the handshake on the server side by using the user_cancel + close_notify alerts. How to achieve this is another question, it will be a configuration of the default SSL virtual host.
user_canceled
This handshake is being canceled for some reason unrelated to a
protocol failure. If the user cancels an operation after the
handshake is complete, just closing the connection by sending a
close_notify is more appropriate. This alert should be followed
by a close_notify. This message is generally a warning.
If you are dealing with subdomains, you probably can use a wildcard certificate for all of your subdomains.
Adding the CA certificate to your client will remove the warning (that's what companies do, no worry).
When hosting with Apache, for example, you can use VirtualDocumentRoot to add domains without editing your configuration. Have a look at the solution provided here : Virtual Hosting in SSL with VirtualDocumentRoot
My application is based on Spring framework and is used to transmit very confidential data.During testing of the application with with proxy tools like Fiddler, Paros Proxy etc. it was found that these tools are intercepting the request data, and data is easily modified before reaching the server.
My application is not currently not integrated with SSL . We will implement SSL /HTTPS. but is this because SSL has not been integrated ?
Is it normal for Proxy tools to intercept the data from a web application with out HTTPS ?
There are two things here.
1) If you don't use SSL the communication is not encrypted, which means that anybody who is able to intercept the traffic, will be able to see the content. You don't necessarily need a proxy for that.
2) With an intercepting HTTP proxy you can see SSL encrypted traffic as well. What the proxy does is building two separate SSL tunnels one between the server and the proxy and one between the client and the proxy. This way the proxy itself can see the whole traffic. Of course the proxy can only provide a fake SSL certificate which will trigger a notification in the browser for the user, but he will probably ignore it.
Yes. If you don't use https, Proxy see everything that the application send or received.
To prevent that, you must use https.
To prevent sslstrip you must use HSTS.
I've got an internal web application that's designed to work in concert with a server running locally on the client machine. (For the curious: the local server is used to decrypt data retrieved from the server using the client machine's GPG key.)
The internal web app is served over HTTPS while the local app is accessible via localhost. It used to be that I could make unencrypted AJAX requests from the page to localhost without any issues; but it seems that recently Chrome was updated to disallow HTTP requests to any destination from pages served over HTTPS.
I understand that in the vast majority of cases, HTTP requests from a page served via HTTPS constitute a security hole. However, since I have complete control over the endpoint in this case (i.e., localhost), it seems to me that it should still be perfectly safe to make HTTP requests to that one destination even when the host page has been served via HTTPS.
Is this possible? To whitelist localhost somehow?
Since you are in control of both the client and the server, it sounds like a good candidate for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). The server will have to set a few response headers to give access to the client. You can learn more here: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/cors/