Louis Zhang zhang2333

Android APK HTTPS user certificates how-to (aka bypassing certificate pinning)

Starting with Android Nougat, Google changed the way apps handle user certificates:

Apps that target API Level 24 and above no longer trust user or admin-added CAs for secure connections, by default.

This means that certificates issued by applications like [Charles][charles] or [mitmproxy][mitmproxy] are no longer accepted, so these proxies won't work for HTTPS traffic.

This tutorial explains what needs to be done to overcome that restriction and be able to sniff any Android app's HTTPS requests.

Android APK hacking how-to

Install and configure SDK

install Android Studio (google it)

configure your shell (considering Linux+Bash):

export ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/Android/Sdk
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/tools

export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools

Installation

Installing dependencies

sudo apt-get install build-essential clang libdbus-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev \
                       libnotify-dev libgnome-keyring-dev libgconf2-dev \
                       libasound2-dev libcap-dev libcups2-dev libxtst-dev \
                       gcc-multilib g++-multilib \
                       libgtk2.0-0 libgconf-2-4 \
                       libasound2 libxtst6 libxss1 libnss3 xvfb \

Commit Message Conventions

These rules are adopted from the AngularJS commit conventions.

Goals
Generating CHANGELOG.md
- Recognizing unimportant commits
- Provide more information when browsing the history
Format of the commit message
Subject line

Better local require() paths for Node.js

Problem

When the directory structure of your Node.js application (not library!) has some depth, you end up with a lot of annoying relative paths in your require calls like:

const Article = require('../../../../app/models/article');

Those suck for maintenance and they're ugly.

Possible solutions

UPDATE: A better way! (August 2015)

As pointed out by @johntyree in the comments, using git reflog is easier and more reliable. Thanks for the suggestion!

 $ git reflog
1ed7510 HEAD@{1}: checkout: moving from develop to 1ed7510
3970d09 HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from b-fix-build to develop
1ed7510 HEAD@{3}: commit: got everything working the way I want
70b3696 HEAD@{4}: commit: upgrade rails, do some refactoring

	-- `menu_click`, by Jacob Rus, September 2006.
	-- Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14669542/automatically-open-the-safari-debugger-when-the-iphone-simulator-is-launched

	on menu_click(mList)
	local appName, topMenu, r

	-- Validate our input
	if mList's length < 3 then error "Menu list is not long enough"

	-- Set these variables for clarity and brevity later on