Capturing mobile phone traffic on Wireshark

Question

How can I capture mobile phone traffic on Wireshark

User · Answer

For Android  I previously used tPacketCapture but it didn t work well for an app streaming some video  I m now using Shark  You need to be root to use it though   It uses TCPDump  check the arguments you can  pass  and creates a pcap file that can be read by Wireshark  The default arguments are usually good enough for me

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Preconditions  adb and wireshark is installed on your computer and you have a rooted android device    Download tcpdump to   Downloads adb push   Downloads tcpdump  sdcard  adb shell su root mv  sdcard tcpdump  data local  cd  data local  chmod  x tcpdump   tcpdump -vv -i any -s 0 -w  sdcard dump pcap CTRL C after you ve captured enough packets  exit exit adb pull  sdcard dump pcap   Downloads    Now you can open the pcap file using Wireshark

User · Answer

Another option which has not been suggested here is to run the app you want to monitor in the Android emulator from the Android SDK  You can then easily capture the traffic with wireshark on the same machine   This was the easiest option for me

User · Answer

Wireshark   OSX   iOS   Great overview so far  but if you want specifics for Wireshark   OSX   iOS    install Wireshark on your computer connect iOS device to computer via USB cable connect iOS device and computer to the same WiFi network run this command in a OSX terminal window   rvictl -s x where x is the UDID of your iOS device   You can find the UDID of your iOS device via iTunes  make sure you are using the UDID and not the serial number   goto Wireshark Capture- gt Options  a dialog box appears  click on the line rvi0 then press the Start button      Now you will see all network traffic on the iOS device   It can be pretty overwhelming   A couple of pointers    don t use iOS with a VPN  you don t be able to make sense of the encrypted traffic use simple filters to focus on interesting traffic ip addr  204 144 14 134 views traffic with a source or destination address of 204 144 14 134 http views only http traffic   Here s a sample window depicting TCP traffic for for pdf download from 204 144 14 134

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I had a similar problem that inspired me to develop an app that could help to capture traffic from an Android device  The app features SSH server that allows you to have traffic in Wireshark on the fly  sshdump wireshark component   As the app uses an OS feature called VPNService to capture traffic  it does not require the root access   The app is in early Beta  If you have any issues suggestions  do not hesitate to let me know   Download From Play  Tutorial in which you could read additional details

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Here are some suggestions    For Android phones  any network  Root your phone  then install tcpdump on it  This app is a tcpdump wrapper that will install tcpdump and enable you to start captures using a GUI  Tip  You will need to make sure you supply the right interface name for the capture and this varies from one device to another  eg -i eth0 or -i tiwlan0  - or use -i any to log all interfaces For Android 4 0  phones  Android PCAP from Kismet uses the USB OTG interface to support packet capture without requiring root  I haven t tried this app  and there are some restrictions on the type of devices supported  see their page  For Android phones  tPacketCapture uses the Android VPN service to intercept packets and capture them  I have used this app successfully  but it also seems to affect the performance with large traffic volumes  eg video streaming  For IOS 5  devices  any network  iOS 5 added a remote virtual interface  RVI  facility that lets you use Mac OS X packet trace programs to capture traces from an iOS device  See here for more details  For all phones  wi-fi only  Set up your PC as a wireless access point  then run wireshark on the PC For all phones  wi-fi only  Get a capture device that can sniff wi-fi  This has the advantage of giving you 802 11x headers as well  but you may miss some of the packets Capture using a VPN server  Its fairly easy to set-up your own VPN server using OpenVPN  You can then route your traffic through your server by setting up the mobile device as a VPN client and capture the traffic on the server end

User · Answer

For Android phone I used tPacketCapture  https   play google com store apps details id jp co taosoftware android packetcapture amp hl en  This app was a lifesaver I was debugging a problem with failure of SSL TLS handshake on my Android app  Tried to setup ad hoc networking so I could use wireshark on my laptop  It did not work for me  This app quickly allowed me to capture network traffic  share it on my Google Drive so I could download on my laptop where I could examine it with Wireshark  Awesome and no root required

User · Answer

Similarly to making your PC a wireless access point  but can be much easier  is using reverse tethering   If you happen to have an HTC phone they have a nice reverse-tethering option called  Internet pass-through   under the network mobile network sharing settings   It routes all your traffic through your PC and you can just run Wireshark there

User · Answer

Make your laptop a wifi hotspot for your phone  any  and connect it to internet  Sniff Traffic on your wifi interface using wireshark   you will get to know a lot of anti privacy stuff

User · Answer

For iOS Devices     Open Terminal and simply write  rvictl -s udid  it ll open an interface on Wireshark with a name  In my case its rvi0   udid is iPhone s unique device id   How to find my iOS Device UDID

User · Answer

Install Fiddler on your PC and use it as a proxy on your Android device   Source  http   www cantoni org 2013 11 06 capture-android-web-traffic-fiddler

User · Answer

In addition to rupello s excellent answer  a  dirty  but very effective trick   For all phones  any  local  network  Set up your PC to Man-In-The-Middle your mobile device   Use Ettercap to do ARP spoofing between your mobile device and your router  and all your mobile s traffic will appear in Wireshark  See this tutorial for set-up details

User · Answer

Packet Capture Android app implements a VPN that logs all network traffic on the Android device  You don t need to setup any VPN proxy server on your PC  Does not needs root  Supports SSL decryption which tPacketCapture does not  It also includes a good log viewer

[android] Capturing mobile phone traffic on Wireshark

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