When using Wireshark to monitor web traffic, you’ll find that a lot of the traffic is encrypted.Mitmproxy is a free and open-source proxy capable of intercepting SSL/TLS for HTTP/1, HTTP/2, and WebSockets. Today, we’re looking at how you can decrypt SSL using Wireshark.

Most sites these days are using SSL or TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption to make sure their users stay safe. Unfortunately, although encryption is good for you when browsing Reddit, it can be quite a hassle for network administrators. Wireshark is a well-known network traffic analysis tool. A lot of network administrators use it to help them with troubleshooting. The tool will take snapshots of frames, letting you sift through and analyze them individually. Often, it’s used in tandem with another network monitoring tool.

Usually, one that provides higher complexity, but read about that in our last section! Wireshark helps network admins take a closer look at the traffic going through their network you can see inside the frames that make up each packet and take a look at the raw data behind them. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is an encryption protocol working on the Transport layer of the OSI model. This protocol uses multiple different encryption methods to ensure that data is secure when traveling through networks. SSL has a successor, TLS or Transport Layer Security, that does its job better in most situations. Why Does SSL Make Using Wireshark Harder? So we’ll be using SSL to refer to both of these at once. SSL encrypts data traveling from network to network, which prevents the network administrator from looking at the data within each packet. With that being said, Wireshark can decrypt SSL so that you can look at the data again. The easiest way to decrypt SSL using Wireshark is by taking advantage of pre-master keys. The client generates a pre-master key and then uses the server to derive a master key, encrypting the traffic. This is today’s cryptography standard and is generally implemented through Diffe-Hellman key exchange. Start capturing and decrypting session keys.Double-click on the browser of your choice.Set an environment variable from Advanced System Settings in Windows.You can set the browser up to log the pre-master key, which will then let Wireshark use it to decrypt SSL. These four steps will allow you to decrypt SSL without needing to access the target server.

Wireshark https traffic decrypt