🔎 MITM proxies

A Man-In-The-Middle proxy (MITM) is a proxy which sits in between the client and the server. That by itself is nothing special and is in fact what all proxies do. What defines this kind of proxy is that it actively interprets the application layer packets. It might also modify the packets as they pass, but more often then not inspecting and tracking is all it does.

Examples:

• /examples/http_mitm_proxy.rs: Spawns a minimal http proxy which accepts http/1.1 and h2 connections alike, and proxies them to the target host;
  • Similar to /examples/http_connect_proxy.rs but MITM for both http and https requests alike.

Description

A MITM proxy is typically setup as an HTTP Proxy, but in case you want it can be setup as a SOCKS5 proxy instead.

Transparent Proxies

Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) proxies that only wish to inspect the traffic without destructive modification, can (try to) mirror the incoming client on the various network layers (tcp, tls and http). This is a kind of User-Agent emulation but in function of the original User-Agent rather than a popular one with huge market share.

Such proxies are also referred to as transparent proxies and you might be able to see some network inspection software expose an option called "transparent mode" or "hidden". If at that point they still are able to inspect your https traffic it is very well possible that they are acting like a "transparent proxy".