Hi everyone, I’ve been trying to understand how MiTM setups like a transparent proxy work.
Obviously, the use-case here is in a personal scope: I’d like to inspect the traffic of some of my machines. I am aware that Squid can be a transparent proxy, and some might use the Burp Suite to analyse network traffic.
Could someone explain the basic networking and the concept of certificates in this scenario? I feel like I don’t understand how certificates are used well enough.
For example: I realise that if someone inserts a root certificate in the certificate store of an OS, the machine trusts said CA, thus allowing encrypted traffic from the machine to be decrypted. However, say the machine was trying to access Amazon; won’t Amazon have its own certificate? I don’t know how I’m confused about such a simple matter. Would really appreciate your help!
Basically, if I were to run a CA locally (on my network) and use that certificate in some OS, I should be able to set up a MiTM setup easily. Except that applications like web browsers don’t care and will utilise certificate pinning anyway, regardless of which certificates I keep in my certificate store in the OS.
Also, let’s say I’m running HAProxy/Caddy/NGINX at home which acts as my SSL-termination point for my network. In this case, if a service wants to access the internet, do these reverse proxies encrypt the outbound traffic with a different certificate?