Daniel Bradbury

September 11, 2017

Intercepting iOS Network Traffic on Mac

For the most part you are probably fine just using a solution like mitmproxy (shown here) and sniffing HTTP/S traffic but sometimes there's a need to go deeper..

When testing an application you may notice something like an in-game chat server "not sending any requests" (w/ mitmproxy) when we are posting a new message to the server / getting messages from other players. Luckily for us we have some better tools to dig into all network activity on the device!

At some point Apple introduced a dev tool called rvictl (Remote Virtual Interface Tool) that allows us to create a seperate network interface for a connected device by providing its UDID. This allows us to use our favorite sniffing tool on the given device :D

Find UDID

Connect your device Open up iTunes, select the device, and copy the UDID (might have to click on serial number to get to it)

Create new interface

rvictl -s YOUR_UDID The command should SUCCEED and you will see your new interface (eg. rvi0)

Sniff away

tcpdump or Wireshark away w/ the new interface and have fun with the extra requests on strange ports :rocket: