How do you monitor network traffic on the iPhone? [closed]

Answer 1

Com'on, no mention of Fiddler? Where's the love :)

Fiddler is a very popular HTTP debugger aimed at developers and not network admins (i.e. Wireshark).

Setting it up for iOS is fairly simple process. It can decrypt HTTPS traffic too!

Our mobile team is finally reliefed after QA department started using Fiddler to troubleshoot issues. Before fiddler, people fiddled around to know who to blame, mobile team or APIs team, but not anymore.

Answer 2

Without knowing exactly what your requirements are, here's what I did to see packts go by from the iPhone: Connect a mac on ethernet, share its network over airport and connect the iPhone to that wireless network. Run Wireshark or Packet Peeper on the mac.

Answer 3

Here is another way http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/21/how-to-inspect-ioss-http-traffic-without-spending-a-dime/

I didn't see Roger Nolan's reply, the above link is same workflow with a different tool.

Answer 4

For Mac OS X

1. Install Charles Proxy
2. In Charles go to Proxy > Proxy Settings. It should display the HTTP proxy port (it's 8888 by default).

---

For Windows

1. Install Fiddler2
2. Tools -> Fiddler Options -> Connections and check "Allow remote computers to connect"

---

General Setup

1. Go to Settings > Wifi > The i symbol > At the bottom Proxy > Set to manual and then for the server put the computer you are working on IP address, for port put 8888 as that is the default for each of these applications

---

ARP Spoofing

General notes for the final section, if you want to sniff all the network traffic would be to use ARP spoofing to forward all the traffic from your iOS to a laptop/desktop. There are multiple tools to ARP spoof and research would need to be done on all the specifics. This allows you to see every ounce of traffic as your router will route all data meant for the iOS device to the laptop/desktop and then you will be forwarding this data to the iOS device (automatically).

Please note I only recommend this as a last resort.

Answer 5

Depending on what you want to do runnning it via a Proxy is not ideal. A transparent proxy might work ok as long as the packets do not get tampered with.

I am about to reverse the GPS data that gets transferred from the iPhone to the iPad on iOS 4.3.x to get to the the vanilla data the best way to get a clean Network Dump is to use "tcpdump" and/or "pirni" as already suggested.

In this particular case where we want the Tethered data it needs to be as transparent as possible. Obviously you need your phone to be JailBroken for this to work.

Answer 6

A general solution would be to use a linux box (could be in a virtual machine) configured as a transparent proxy to intercept the traffic, and then analyse it using wireshark or tcpdump or whatever you like. Perhaps MacOS can do this also, I haven't tried.

Or if you can run the app in the simulator, you can probably monitor the traffic on your own machine.