hash=$(openssl x509 -noout -subject_hash_old - in $ca) The filename of the certificate on the emulator needs to be set as the hash of the certificate. We also need to get a special hash to identify the certificate. Let's save that to a variable to use later. The first time we ran mitmproxy, it saved its certificates to the home directory. Let's now find our certificate file and push it to the device. Once booted, we unlock the device further: adb root emulator -avd test-proxy -writable-system & You'll have to insert the name of your emulator here. This will allow us to write to the system files of the device. These instructions should work on most newer emulators.Ī silver lining to this process is that installing a user certificate requires enabling the device's lock screen but this method of installing a system certificate allows us to keep the lock screen disabled.įrom the commandline, perform the following:įirst, launch the emulator with the -writable-system flag. This process should also work on real devices that have been rooted, but you may need to find a different set of commands which works on your particular device. This can only be done with root access to the device, which we have with our emulators. So now we need to add the mitmproxy certificate to the system certificate list. Installing a certificate through the UI puts it into the user certificate list, but only certificates in the system list are trusted for app-based network requests. This is because the device keeps two lists of trusted certificates: user certificates and system certificates. You could load in the browser, but HTTPS requests which originate from inside native apps would still be blocked. If you were to navigate to the special url hosted by mitmproxy: and follow the instructions there for installing and trusting the mitmproxy certificate, this would only fix the web browsers on the device.

Android version 7, 'Nougat', introduced stricter security rules when it comes to installing SSL certificates. Most of the guides you'll find online for how to set up a proxy for Android emulators will only work on Android version 6 and lower. This is where things get a little tricky. The next step is to install and trust the mitmproxy certificate. By default, our emulator does not trust the mitmproxy certificate, and refuses to load the page. The reason it does not load is because mitmproxy is intercepting the request and forwarding the response, but this site uses HTTPS and mitmproxy signs each response with the special mitmproxy certificate. To confirm that things are set up so far, open a web browser on the emulator and try to load, the page should not load! Now the emulator will try to forward all traffic through mitmproxy which we are running on the same port. Set a 'Manual Proxy Configuration' with host name and port 8080. Click on the Settings tab on the left side, then the inset Proxy tab on top. Start an emulator and open the emulator settings pane (not the Settings app inside the emulator). The empty pane it displays should fill up with network traffic once we configure our simulator to point to it.Īndroid emulators have a built-in setting for configuring HTTP and HTTPS proxies. The proxy runs on localhost port 8080 by default. Installing this way is required for the Javascript library we will be using later. You may need to make sure you have Python3 and pip3 installed first. These instructions are for MacOS, but should work the same from WSL. Mitmproxy can be installed and run on Windows from within the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Setting up mitmproxy for Android emulators I hope to announce a convenient way to capture network traffic with mitmproxy from Java code in a future article. For more details on proxies and why I chose mitmproxy, read the previous article.Īs with last week, the example code is written in Javascript. We can also modify the responses, forcing the app into states we dictate, for testing purposes. We can then perform advanced assertions in our test, making sure that the app is sending requests to other services as expected. This week, we'll do the same thing with Android Emulators.Ī brief recap from last week: We can start a man-in-the-middle proxy called mitmproxy which will capture all the network traffic from the emulator, and let us access the requests and responses from our test script. Last week, we covered how to capture network traffic generated by an iOS simulator within an Appium test.

Charles proxy android emulator mac