RawCap Redux

A new version of RawCap has been released today. This portable little sniffer now supports writing PCAP data to stdout and named pipes as an alternative to saving the captured packets to disk. We have also changed the target .NET Framework version from 2.0 to 4.7.2, so that you can run RawCap on a modern Windows OS without having to install a legacy .NET Framework.

Here’s a summary of the improvements in the new RawCap version (0.2.0.0) compared to the old version (0.1.5.0):

• Uses .NET 4.7.2 instead of 2.0
• Support for writing to stdout
• Support for writing to named pipes
• Large (64 MB) ring buffer to prevent packet drops
• Automatic firewall configuration

Out of the software we develop and maintain here at Netresec, NetworkMiner is the most popular one. But you’re probably not aware that RawCap is our second most popular tool in terms of downloads, with around 100 unique downloads every day. RawCap started out as just being a quick hack that we released for free to the community in 2011 without expecting it to gain much attention. However, it quickly gained popularity, maybe due to the fact that it’s just a tiny .exe file and that it doesn’t require any external libraries or DLL’s to sniff network traffic (other than the .NET Framework).

RawCap embraces the Unix philosophy to do only one thing, and do it well. Thanks to RawCap’s simplicity we have only needed to make a few minor updates of the tool since its first release 9 years ago. However, today we’re finally adding some new features that have been requested by users over the years. One such feature is that RawCap now automatically creates a Windows firewall rule when the tool is started. Before this feature was introduced users would have to run wf.msc (i.e. the "Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security") and manually create an inbound rule to allow RawCap.exe to receive incoming traffic. Without such a firewall rule RawCap would only be able to capture outgoing traffic.

RawCap can be started in two different modes. Either as an interactive console application, or as a “normal” command line utility. Run RawCap.exe without any arguments, or simply double click the RawCap.exe icon to use the interactive mode. You will then be asked which interface to capture packets from and what filename you’d like to save them to.

The other alternative is to supply all the arguments to RawCap when it is started. Use “RawCap --help” to show which arguments you can use. You’ll need to use this mode if you want to write the captured traffic to standard output (stdout) or a named pipe, or if you want RawCap to automatically stop capturing after a certain time or packet count.

As you can see, running “RawCap.exe -s 60 127.0.0.1 localhost.pcap” will capture packets from localhost to a file called “localhost.pcap” for 60 seconds and then exit.

There are a couple of drawbacks with the new RawCap version though, it is a larger binary (48kB instead of 23kB) and it uses more CPU and RAM compared to the old version. We will therefore continue making the old RawCap version available to anyone who might need it.

Visit the RawCap product page to download this tool and learn more.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 30 January 2020 14:32:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Netresec​ #RawCap​ #sniffer​ #PCAP​ #named pipe​ #Wireshark​ #WiFi​ #127.0.0.1​

Raspberry PI WiFi Access Point with TLS Inspection

This is a how-to guide for setting up a Raspberry Pi as a WiFi Access Point, which acts as a transparent TLS proxy and saves the decrypted traffic in PCAP files.

Step 1: Install PolarProxy for Linux ARM

We will start with installing PolarProxy, which will be used for the TLS decryption and re-encryption. The steps are almost identical to those in the official PolarProxy installation guide, except here we will download the "linux-arm" build of PolarProxy instead of the x64 version.

Note: The installation instructions above will fail on 64-bit ARM Linux OS's since the downloaded PolarProxy tarball is compiled for 32-bit ARM Linux. Luckily, we do have a linux-arm64 build as well, which is available here:
https://www.netresec.com/?download=PolarProxy_linux-arm64

Verify that the PolarProxy service is running as expected with these commands:

Step 2: Set up your Pi as a WiFi AP

The Raspberry Pi Foundation have a great guide for "Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a Wireless Access Point". Follow the instructions in their guide for the NAT mode setup (first section), but replace the iptables config with this:

Step 3: Configure the Clients

The final step is to connect the clients (phones, tablets or computers) to the Raspberry Pi WiFi Access Point and install the root CA from PolarProxy.

Follow the instructions for "Trusting the PolarProxy root CA" in the official PolarProxy setup guide to install the public certificate from the TLS proxy in your clients. The certificate can be downloaded from the Raspberry Pi by browsing to http://192.168.4.1:10080/polarproxy.cer.

PCAP PCAP PCAP

Your Raspberry Pi WiFi AP will now intercept all HTTPS traffic going to tcp/443 and save the decrypted traffic in PCAP files, one per hour. The PCAP files with decrypted TLS traffic can be found in the /var/log/PolarProxy/ directory of your Raspberry Pi.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 26 September 2019 11:37:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #PolarProxy​ #PCAP​ #WiFi​ #TLS​ #SSL​ #HTTPS​ #Wireshark​ #http2​