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#  Mitmproxy Advanced Features

#  Anticache

When the anticache option is set, it removes headers (if-none-match and if-modified-since) that might elicit a 304 not modified response from the server. This is useful when you want to make sure you capture an HTTP exchange in its totality. It’s also often used during client-side replay, when you want to make sure the server responds with complete data.

#  Client-side replay

Client-side replay does what it says on the tin: you provide a previously saved HTTP conversation, and mitmproxy replays the client requests one by one. Note that mitmproxy serialises the requests, waiting for a response from the server before starting the next request. This might differ from the recorded conversation, where requests may have been made concurrently.

You may want to use client-side replay in conjunction with the anticache option, to make sure the server responds with complete data.

#  Map Local

The map_local option lets you specify an arbitrary number of patterns that define redirections of HTTP requests to local files or directories. The local file is fetched instead of the original resource and transparently returned to the client.

map_local patterns look like this:

|url-regex|local-path
|flow-filter|url-regex|local-path

#  Examples

Pattern Description
|example.com/main.js|~/main-local.js Replace example.com/main.js with ~/main-local.js.
|example.com/static|~/static Replace example.com/static/foo/bar.css with ~/static/foo/bar.css.
|example.com/static/foo|~/static Replace example.com/static/foo/bar.css with ~/static/bar.css.
|~m GET|example.com/static|~/static Replace example.com/static/foo/bar.css with ~/static/foo/bar.css (but only for GET requests).

#  Details

If local-path is a file, this file will always be served. File changes will be reflected immediately, there is no caching.

If local-path is a directory, url-regex is used to split the request URL in two parts and part on the right is appended to local-path, excluding the query string. However, if url-regex contains a regex capturing group, this behavior changes and the first capturing group is appended instead (and query strings are not stripped). Special characters are mapped to _. If the file cannot be found, /index.html is appended and we try again. Directory traversal outside of the originally specified directory is not possible.

To illustrate this, consider the following example which maps all requests for example.org/css* to the local directory ~/static-css.

                  ┌── url regex ──┬─ local path ─┐
map_local option: |example.com/css|~/static-css
                            │
                            │    URL is split here
                            ▼            ▼
HTTP Request URL: https://example.com/css/print/main.css?timestamp=123
                                               │                ▼
                                               ▼              query string is ignored
Served File:      Preferred: ~/static-css/print/main.css
                   Fallback: ~/static-css/print/main.css/index.html
                  Otherwise: 404 response without content

If the file depends on the query string, we can use regex capturing groups. In this example, all GET requests for example.org/index.php?page=<page-name> are mapped to ~/static-dir/<page-name>:

                    flow
                  ┌filter┬─────────── url regex ───────────┬─ local path ─┐
map_local option: |~m GET|example.com/index.php\\?page=(.+)|~/static-dir
                            │                           │
                            │                           │ regex group = suffix
                            ▼                           ▼
HTTP Request URL: https://example.com/index.php?page=aboutus
                                                        │
                                                        ▼
Served File:                 Preferred: ~/static-dir/aboutus
                              Fallback: ~/static-dir/aboutus/index.html
                             Otherwise: 404 response without content

#  Map Remote

The map_remote option lets you specify an arbitrary number of patterns that define replacements within HTTP request URLs before they are sent to a server. The substituted URL is fetched instead of the original resource and the corresponding HTTP response is returned transparently to the client. Note that if the original destination uses HTTP2, the substituted destination needs to support HTTP2 as well, otherwise the substituted request may fail. As a workaround you can start mitmproxy with the --no-http2 flag to disable HTTP2. map_remote patterns look like this:

|flow-filter|url-regex|replacement
|url-regex|replacement

The separator is arbitrary, and is defined by the first character.

#  Examples

Map all requests ending with .jpg to https://placedog.net/640/480?random. Note that this might fail if the original HTTP request destination uses HTTP2 but the replaced destination does not support HTTP2.

|.*\.jpg$|https://placedog.net/640/480?random

Re-route all GET requests from example.org to mitmproxy.org (using | as the separator):

|~m GET|//example.org/|//mitmproxy.org/

#  Modify Body

The modify_body option lets you specify an arbitrary number of patterns that define replacements within bodies of flows. modify_body patterns look like this:

/flow-filter/body-regex/replacement
/flow-filter/body-regex/@file-path
/body-regex/replacement
/body-regex/@file-path

The separator is arbitrary, and is defined by the first character.

Modify hooks fire when either a client request or a server response is received. Only the matching flow component is affected: so, for example, if a modify hook is triggered on server response, the replacement is only run on the Response object leaving the Request intact. You control whether the hook triggers on the request, response or both using the filter pattern. If you need finer-grained control than this, it’s simple to create a script using the replacement API on Flow components.

#  Examples

Replace foo with bar in bodies of requests:

/~q/foo/bar

Replace foo with the data read from ~/xss-exploit:

mitmdump --modify-body :~q:foo:@~/xss-exploit

#  Modify Headers

The modify_headers option lets you specify a set of headers to be modified. New headers can be added, and existing headers can be overwritten or removed. modify_headers patterns look like this:

/flow-filter/name/value
/flow-filter/name/@file-path
/name/value
/name/@file-path

The separator is arbitrary, and is defined by the first character.

Existing headers are overwritten by default. This can be changed using a filter expression.

Modify hooks fire when either a client request or a server response is received. Only the matching flow component is affected: so, for example, if a modify hook is triggered on server response, the replacement is only run on the Response object leaving the Request intact. You control whether the hook triggers on the request, response or both using the filter pattern. If you need finer-grained control than this, it’s simple to create a script using the replacement API on Flow components.

#  Examples

Set the Host header to example.org for all requests (existing Host headers are replaced):

/~q/Host/example.org

Set the Host header to example.org for all requests that do not have an existing Host header:

/~q & !~h Host:/Host/example.org

Set the User-Agent header to the data read from ~/useragent.txt for all requests (existing User-Agent headers are replaced):

/~q/Host/@~/useragent.txt

Remove existing Host headers from all requests:

/~q/Host/

#  Proxy Authentication

Asks the user for authentication before they are permitted to use the proxy. Authentication headers are stripped from the flows, so they are not passed to upstream servers. For now, only HTTP Basic authentication is supported. The proxy auth options are not compatible with the transparent, socks or reverse proxy mode.

#  Server-side replay

The server_replay option lets us replay server responses from saved HTTP conversations. To do this, we use a set of heuristics to match incoming requests with saved responses. By default, we exclude request headers when matching incoming requests with responses from the replay file, and use only the URL and request method for matching. This works in most circumstances, and makes it possible to replay server responses in situations where request headers would naturally vary, e.g. using a different user agent.

There is a slew of ways to customise the matching heuristic, including specifying headers to include, request parameters to exclude, etc. These options are collected under the server_replay prefix - please see the built-in documentation for details.

#  Response refreshing

Simply replaying server responses without modification will often result in unexpected behaviour. For example cookie timeouts that were in the future at the time a conversation was recorded might be in the past at the time it is replayed. By default, mitmproxy refreshes server responses before sending them to the client. The date, expires and last-modified headers are all updated to have the same relative time offset as they had at the time of recording. So, if they were in the past at the time of recording, they will be in the past at the time of replay, and vice versa. Cookie expiry times are updated in a similar way.

You can turn off this behaviour by setting the server_replay_refresh option to false.

#  Replaying a session recorded in Reverse-proxy Mode

If you have captured the session in reverse proxy mode, in order to replay it you still have to specify the server URL, otherwise you may get the error: ‘HTTP protocol error in client request: Invalid HTTP request form (expected authority or absolute…)’.

During replay, when the client’s requests match previously recorded requests, then the respective recorded responses are simply replayed by mitmproxy. Otherwise, the unmatched requests is forwarded to the upstream server. If forwarding is not desired, you can use the –kill (-k) switch to prevent that.

#  Sticky auth

The stickyauth option is analogous to the sticky cookie option, in that HTTP Authorization headers are simply replayed to the server once they have been seen. This is enough to allow you to access a server resource using HTTP Basic authentication through the proxy. Note that mitmproxy doesn’t (yet) support replay of HTTP Digest authentication.

#  Sticky cookies

When the stickycookie option is set, mitmproxy will add the cookie most recently set by the server to any cookie-less request. Consider a service that sets a cookie to track the session after authentication. Using sticky cookies, you can fire up mitmproxy, and authenticate to a service as you usually would using a browser. After authentication, you can request authenticated resources through mitmproxy as if they were unauthenticated, because mitmproxy will automatically add the session tracking cookie to requests. Among other things, this lets you script interactions with authenticated resources (using tools like wget or curl) without having to worry about authentication.

Sticky cookies are especially powerful when used in conjunction with client replay - you can record the authentication process once, and simply replay it on startup every time you need to interact with the secured resources.

#  Streaming

By default, mitmproxy will read an entire request/response, perform any indicated manipulations on it, and then send the message on to the other party. This can be problematic when downloading or uploading large files. When streaming is enabled, message bodies are not buffered on the proxy but instead sent directly to the server/client. HTTP headers are still fully buffered before being sent.

Request/response streaming is enabled by specifying a size cutoff in the stream_large_bodies option.

#  Customizing Streaming

You can also use a script to customise exactly which requests or responses are streamed. Requests/Responses that should be tagged for streaming by setting their .stream attribute to True:

"""
Select which responses should be streamed.

Enable response streaming for all HTTP flows.
This is equivalent to passing `--set stream_large_bodies=1` to mitmproxy.
"""


def responseheaders(flow):
    """
    Enables streaming for all responses.
    This is equivalent to passing `--set stream_large_bodies=1` to mitmproxy.
    """
    flow.response.stream = True
examples/addons/http-stream-simple.py

#  Websockets

The stream_websockets option enables an analogous behaviour for websockets. When WebSocket streaming is enabled, portions of the code which may perform changes to the WebSocket message payloads will not have any effect on the actual payload sent to the server as the frames are immediately forwarded to the server. In contrast to HTTP streaming, where the body is not stored, the message payload will still be stored in the WebSocket flow.

#  Upstream Certificates

When mitmproxy receives a connection destined for an SSL-protected service, it freezes the connection before reading its request data, and makes a connection to the upstream server to “sniff” the contents of its SSL certificate. The information gained - the Common Name and Subject Alternative Names - is then used to generate the interception certificate, which is sent to the client so the connection can continue.

This rather intricate little dance lets us seamlessly generate correct certificates even if the client has specified only an IP address rather than the hostname. It also means that we don’t need to sniff additional data to generate certs in transparent mode.

Upstream cert sniffing is on by default, and can optionally be turned off with the upstream_cert option.