"Proxying" HTTP requests - http

I have some software which runs as a black box, I have no access to it. This software makes HTTP requests. What I want to do is intercept these requests, forward them on, catch the response, do something with it, before passing the response back to the software.
Can this be done? What's the best method?
Thanks
Edit: Requests are to the public internet from a local intranet via a gateway/router. I have root access to my machine. Another machine could be used as intermediate gateway.
Edit 2: Requests are not encrypted. What I am actually trying to do is save down any images that are requested.

Try yellosoft-alchemy.

If the communication isn't encrypted, use Ethereal (or any other similar program) to sniff the communication on the wire.
edit: since the communication isn't encrypted, you can do that easily with Ethereal. You can save each TCP stream independently from there.
Edit2: Ok, you want to do this automatically. In this case, I would suggest you look at two tools available on Linux called tcpflow and tcpreen.
tcpreen creates a proxy similar to what you want between a local port and a remote one. It's a TCP proxy, not an HTTP proxy so this means you'll have to write some parsing tool to isolate the HTTP streams that contain the images you want (probably based on the MIME type of the response). it's not too complex a task, though, if you understand how HTTP works.
tcpflow is similar to tcpreen except that it's a sniffer instead of a proxy. Use whatever tool you think its more adapted to your environment.

Related

What are the benefits of HTTP reverse shell over TCP reverse shell?

I had made a multiclient TCP reverse shell and saw a course video which said HTTP reverse shells are better because how its difficult to trace back to the attacker compared to TCP . I didn't understand it .
I have tried googling this question with not much help .
Are HTTP reverse shells actually beneficial over TCP ? How ?
I personally think having HTTP reverse shell is bad since http is connectionless , when the attacker wants to communicate with the host , it can't since there is no connection to it and attacker can only communicate if a request (like GET) comes from the host. Am I missing anything here ?
Please explain....
First, I am just going to answer for HTTPS over HTTP because I don't see much reason to use HTTP over HTTPS, but there are a lot of benefits to encrypting your traffic this way.
It's unlikely to be auto-filtered
Many networks will block outbound traffic other than a few special ports. So, using something like port 6666 is likely to set off a few alerts. If you try to use a port for something other than it's intended use, some software can use deep packet inspection (DPI) to detect/block this. In other words, if your payload tries to use port 80/443 without using HTTP/HTTPS, it may raise an alert and get your payload caught.
It's stealthier.
I would say two of the most important factors to being a stealthy payload are looking like normal traffic so as to avoid attracting attention in the first place and to be difficult to inspect if attention does come to your connection. HTTPS accomplishes both of these rather well.
This is because on most networks, it is extremely common to see nodes on your network making requests to the internet all the time. Compare a beaconing payload making HTTPS requests to some payload connecting over some random port.
Now, as far as your question at the end... it depends on your situation, but you are right that there will often be a delay if you use something like HTTP(S) over maintaining an established connection. I alluded to this earlier, but we are able to communicate through beaconing. Essentially, that just means that the payload will check back with the server on a set interval (often with a jitter to make it a little harder to detect).
The victim will make an HTTP(S) request to your command and control (C2) server that contains the results of the previous command you told it to run. Your server will return an HTTP(S) response that contains the next instructions for the payload.

non-http in mochiweb

I am using mochiweb for a server that may also get a TCP connction to which the client sends a simple string (without a newline, the string is not http). Mochiweb uses HTTP sockets and therefore fails to detect this (i dont even get http_error that i can easily get in mochiweb). How can I solve this? Ideally I wish to change mochiweb code to do setopt({packet, http_or_raw}) but this kind of thing does not exist. How would you recommend handling this? my current idea was to modify mochiweb and use erlang:decode_packet, is there a better approach?
EDIT:
More info.
Our server is a websocket service. We wish to allow
people without a ws supporting browser to use it so we use a
flash object to do websocket when the browser can't. The flash object needs to get a flash policy file. Flash
forces the file to be in one of two places:
- port 843 (flash hard coded)
- the port of the ws service
The flash protocol is NOT HTTP based.
Amazon ELB does not allow port forwarding for
most ports below 1024, so we
implemented the flash server in the same port via a patch to
mochiweb (https://github.com/nivertech/mochiweb/tree/ori_flash_170811).
Any advice?
mochiweb isn't designed to handle this use case, if it doesn't look
like HTTP then the connection is closed and it gets discarded. You
would have to go around mochiweb_http for this purpose. I'd suggest
using an alternate port, or making it look like HTTP.
If I really wanted to do what you say you want to do, I would copy
mochiweb_http.erl to some other name (e.g. sometimes_not_http.erl) and
make the appropriate changes to loop/2 and request/2… then instead of
adding mochiweb_http to your supervisor you'd add sometimes_not_http.
It is not necessary or recommended to make modifications to mochiweb
in-place.

Why can't I view Omegle's HTTP request/response headers?

I'm trying to write a small program that I can talk to Omegle strangers via command line for school. However I'm having some issues, I'm sure I could solve the problem if I could view the headers sent however if you talk to a stranger on Omegle while Live HTTP Headers (or a similar plug-in or program) is running the headers don't show. Why is this? Are they not sending HTTP headers and using a different protocol instead?
I'm really lost with this, any ideas?
I had success in writing a command line Omegle chat client. However it is hardcoded in C for POSIX and curses.
I'm not sure what exactly your problem is, maybe it's just something with your method of reverse engineering Omegle's protocol. If you want to make a chat client, use a network packet analyzer such as Wireshark (or if you're on a POSIX system I recommend tcpdump), study exactly what data is sent and received during a chat session and have your program emulate what the default web client is doing. Another option is to de-compile/reverse engineer the default web client itself, which would be a more thorough method but more complicated.

A Question regarding wget

when I type wget http://yahoo.com:80 on unix shell. Can some one explain me what exactly happens from entering the command to reaching the yahoo server. Thank you very much in advance.
RFC provide you with all the details you need and are not tied to a tool or OS.
Wget uses in your case HTTP, which bases on TCP, which in turn uses IP, then it depends on what you use, most of the time you will encounter Ethernet frames.
In order to understand what happens, I urge you to install Wireshark and have a look at the dissected frames, you will get an overview of what data belongs to which network layer. That is the most easy way to visualize and learn what happens. Beside this if you really like (irony) funny documents (/irony) have a look at the corresponding RFCs HTTP: 2616 for example, for the others have a look at the external links at the bottom of the wikipedia articles.
The program uses DNS to resolve the host name to an IP. The classic API call is gethostbyname although newer programs should use getaddrinfo to be IPv6 compatible.
Since you specify the port, the program can skip looking up the default port for http. But if you hadn't, it would try a getservbyname to look up the default port (then again, wget may just embed port 80).
The program uses the network API to connect to the remote host. This is done with socket and connect
The program writes an http request to the connection with a call to write
The program reads the http response with one or more calls to read.

how to intercept and modify HTTP responses on server side?

I am working with a client/server application which uses HTTP, and my goal is to add new features to it. I can extend the client by hooking my own code to some specific events, but unfortunately the server is not customizable. Both client and server are in a Windows environment.
My current problem is that performance is awful when a lot of data are received from the server: it takes time to transmit it and time to process it. The solution could be to have an application on server side to do the processing and send only the result (which is much smaller). The problem is there is not built-in functions to manipulate responses from the server before sending them.
I was thinking to listen to all traffic on port 80, identifying relevant HTTP responses and send them to my application while blocking the response (to avoid sending huge data volume which won't be processed by the client). As I am lacking a lot of network knowledge, I am a bit lost when thinking about how to do it.
I had a look at some low-level packet intercepting methods like WinPCap, but it seems to require a lot of work to do what I need. Moreover I think it is not possible to block or modify responses with this API.
A reverse proxy which allows user scripts to be triggered by specific requests or responses would be perfect, but I am wondering if there is no simpler way to do this interception/send elsewhere work.
What would be the simplest and cleanest method to enable this behavior?
Thanks!
I ended making a simple reverse proxy to access the HTTP server. The reverse proxy then extracts relevant information from the server response and sends it to the server-side processing component, and replaces information extracted from the response by an ID the client uses to request the other component to get the processing results.
The article at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/web-security/HTTPReverseProxy.aspx was very helpful to make the first draft of the reverse proxy.
Hmm.... too much choices.
2 ideas:
configure on all clients a Http Proxy. there are some out there, that let you manipulate what goes through in both directions (with scripts, plugins).
or
make a pass through project, that listens to port 80, and forewards the needed stuff to port 8080 (where your original server app runs)
question is, what software is the server app running at,
and what knowledge (dev) do you have?
ah. and what is "huge data"? kilobyte? megabyte? gigabyte?

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