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MASTG-TECH-0063: Setting up an Interception Proxy

Android Studio is an integrated platform for security testing mobile and web applications. Its tools work together seamlessly to support the entire testing process, from initial mapping and analysis of attack surfaces to finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities. Burp Proxy operates as a web proxy server for Burp Suite, which is positioned as a man-in-the-middle between the browser and web server(s). Burp Suite allows you to intercept, inspect, and modify incoming and outgoing raw HTTP traffic.

Setting up Burp to proxy your traffic is pretty straightforward. We assume that both your iOS device and host computer are connected to a Wi-Fi network that permits client-to-client traffic. If client-to-client traffic is not permitted, you can use usbmuxd to connect to Burp via USB.

PortSwigger provides a good tutorial on setting up an iOS device to work with Burp and a tutorial on installing Burp's CA certificate to an iOS device.

Using Burp via USB on a Jailbroken Device

In Accessing the Device Shell you can learn how to use iProxy to use SSH via USB. When doing dynamic analysis, it's interesting to use the SSH connection to route our traffic to Burp that is running on our computer. Let's get started:

First we need to use iproxy to make SSH from iOS available on localhost.

$ iproxy 2222 22
waiting for connection

The next step is to make a remote port forwarding of port 8080 on the iOS device to the localhost interface on our computer to port 8080.

ssh -R 8080:localhost:8080 root@localhost -p 2222

You should now be able to reach Burp on your iOS device. Open Safari on iOS and go to 127.0.0.1:8080 and you should see the Burp Suite Page. This would also be a good time to install the CA certificate of Burp on your iOS device.

The last step would be to set the proxy globally on your iOS device:

  1. Go to Settings -> Wi-Fi
  2. Connect to any Wi-Fi (you can literally connect to any Wi-Fi as the traffic for port 80 and 443 will be routed through USB, as we are just using the Proxy Setting for the Wi-Fi so we can set a global Proxy)
  3. Once connected click on the small blue icon on the right side of the connect Wi-Fi
  4. Configure your Proxy by selecting Manual
  5. Type in 127.0.0.1 as Server
  6. Type in 8080 as Port

Open Safari and go to any webpage, you should see now the traffic in Burp. Thanks @hweisheimer for the initial idea!