#  Client playback: a 30 second example

My local cafe is serviced by a rickety and unreliable wireless network, generously sponsored with ratepayers' money by our city council. After connecting, you are redirected to an SSL-protected page that prompts you for a username and password. Once you’ve entered your details, you are free to enjoy the intermittent dropouts, treacle-like speeds and incorrectly configured transparent proxy.

I tend to automate this kind of thing at the first opportunity, on the theory that time spent now will be more than made up in the long run. In this case, I might use Firebug to ferret out the form post parameters and target URL, then fire up an editor to write a little script using Python’s urllib to simulate a submission. That’s a lot of futzing about. With mitmproxy we can do the job in literally 30 seconds, without having to worry about any of the details. Here’s how.

#  1. Run mitmdump to record our HTTP conversation to a file.

mitmdump -w wireless-login

#  2. Point your browser at the mitmdump instance.

There is a Firefox addon called FoxyProxy that lets you switch quickly to and from mitmproxy. I’m assuming you’ve already configured your browser with mitmproxy’s SSL certificate authority.

#  3. Log in as usual

And that’s it! You now have a serialised version of the login process in the file wireless-login, and you can replay it at any time like this:

mitmdump -C wireless-login

#  Embellishments

We’re really done at this point, but there are a couple of embellishments we could make if we wanted. I use wicd to automatically join wireless networks I frequent, and it lets me specify a command to run after connecting. I used the client replay command above and voila! - totally hands-free wireless network startup.

We might also want to prune requests that download CSS, JS, images and so forth. These add only a few moments to the time it takes to replay, but they’re not really needed and I somehow feel compelled to trim them anyway. So, we fire up the mitmproxy console tool on our serialised conversation, like so:

mitmproxy -r wireless-login

We can now go through and manually delete (using the d keyboard shortcut) everything we want to trim. When we’re done, we use w to save the conversation back to the file.