CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidnetwork-programmingemulationtrafficsniffer
mlindeboom
mlindeboom

Reputation: 1691

Android emulator: How to monitor network traffic?

How do I monitor network traffic sent and received from my android emulator?

Upvotes: 169

Views: 182009

Answers (15)

user1371666
user1371666

Reputation: 497

To add to answer from Christopher Orr
For second option run following in terminal in android studio

c:\Users\<your-username-in-windows>\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\emulator\emulator.exe -list-avds

Upvotes: 0

Sahil Gupta
Sahil Gupta

Reputation: 461

Requestly now has one click support to connect to Android Emulators which can not only let you view your network requests but also can modify them if needed.

Steps

  1. Download Requestly Desktop App from here.
  2. Start your Android Emulator.
  3. Go to Mobile Apps & Browsers tab.
  4. Click on Connect button of emulator you want to connect to.

Requestly Android Emulator Debugger

You might need to trust CA certificate if SSL pinning is enabled for your app.

That's it. Now you can see all your network requests and modify them if needed. Here are the docs for same

Upvotes: 0

Ido.Co
Ido.Co

Reputation: 5487

I think running the traffic through an HTTP proxy is the best solution.

One of the main problems I encountered when trying to connect a MITM HTTP proxy to an Android emulator was inspecting SSL traffic.

Installing a root certificate on an emulated device was more trick than I expected.

One of my colleagues created an updated step-by-step guide on capturing SSL traffic on an emulated Android device.

Upvotes: 0

brondibur
brondibur

Reputation: 171

While Android Studio's App Inspection's Network Inspector menu is helpful for tracking network requests, I've noticed that it doesn't track all requests. Here's the documentation.

The easiest way to track network requests for the android emulator that I know and use is HTTP Toolkit. It really quick to set up, and has a nice UI (similar to Chrome Dev Tools' Networks tab) for tracking the requests.

Just install it, click on the "Android device via ADB" option, and accept the prompts shown in the emulator (docs).

HTTP Toolkit UI

Upvotes: 7

Ritveak
Ritveak

Reputation: 3768

I would suggest you use Wireshark.

Steps:

  1. Install Wireshark.
  2. Select the network connection that you are using for the calls(for eg, select the Wifi if you are using it)
  3. There will be many requests and responses, close extra applications.
  4. Usually the requests are in green color, once you spot your request, copy the destination address and use the filter on top by typing ip.dst==52.187.182.185 by putting the destination address.

You can make use of other filtering techniques mentioned here to get specific traffic.

Upvotes: 6

Tom Susel
Tom Susel

Reputation: 3437

For OS X you can use Charles, it's simple and easy to use.

For more information, please have a look at Android Emulator and Charles Proxy blog post.

Upvotes: 16

Fivos
Fivos

Reputation: 568

You can monitor network traffic from Android Studio. Go to Android Monitor and open Network tab.

http://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/ddms.html

UPDATE: ⚠️ Android Device Monitor was deprecated in Android Studio 3.1. See more in https://developer.android.com/studio/profile/monitor

Upvotes: 4

Prof. Moriarty
Prof. Moriarty

Reputation: 641

It is now possible to use Wireshark directly to capture Android emulator traffic. There is an extcap plugin called androiddump which makes it possible. You need to have a tcpdump executable in the system image running on the emulator (most current images have it, tested with API 24 and API 27 images) and adbd running as root on the host (just run adb root). In the list of the available interfaces in Wireshark (Qt version only, the deprecated GTK+ doesn't have it) or the list shown with tshark -D there should be several Android interfaces allowing to sniff Bluetooth, Logcat, or Wifi traffic, e.g.:

android-wifi-tcpdump-emulator-5554 (Android WiFi Android_SDK_built_for_x86 emulator-5554)

Upvotes: 12

Dhiraj Himani
Dhiraj Himani

Reputation: 1092

You can use http://docs.mitmproxy.org/en/stable/install.html

Its easy to setup and won't require any extra tweaks.

I go through various tool but found it to be really good and easy.

Upvotes: 1

Tad
Tad

Reputation: 4784

A current release of Android Studio did not correctly apply the -tcpdump argument. I was still able to capture a dump by passing the related parameter to qemu as follows:

tools/emulator -engine classic -tcpdump dump.cap -avd myAvd

Upvotes: 6

Paddy
Paddy

Reputation: 84

You can start the emulator with the command -avd Adfmf -http-proxy http://SYSTEM_IP:PORT. I used HTTP Analyzer, but it should work for anything else. More details can be found here: http://stick2code.blogspot.in/2014/04/intercept-http-requests-sent-from-app.html

Upvotes: 2

Waltsu
Waltsu

Reputation: 612

It is also possible to use http proxy to monitor http requests from emulator. You can pass -http-proxy flag when starting a new emulator to set proxy (Example burp) to monitor Android traffic. Example usage ./emulator -http-proxy localhost:8080 -avd android2.2. Note that in my example I'm using Burp, and it is listening port 8080. More info can be found here.

Upvotes: 22

Laramie
Laramie

Reputation: 5587

You can use Fiddler to monitor http traffic:

http://aurir.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/tutorial-getting-android-emulator-working-with-fiddler-http-proxy-tool/

You can also use Fiddler2 here.

Upvotes: 4

Christopher Orr
Christopher Orr

Reputation: 111565

There are two ways to capture network traffic directly from an Android emulator:

  1. Copy and run an ARM-compatible tcpdump binary on the emulator, writing output to the SD card, perhaps (e.g. tcpdump -s0 -w /sdcard/emulator.cap).

  2. Run emulator -tcpdump emulator.cap -avd my_avd to write all the emulator's traffic to a local file on your PC

In both cases you can then analyse the pcap file with tcpdump or Wireshark as normal.

Upvotes: 127

Bitdivision
Bitdivision

Reputation: 107

Yes, wireshark will work.

I don't think there is any easy way to filter out solely emulator traffic, since it is coming from the same src IP.

Perhaps the best way would be to set up a very bare VMware environment and only run the emulator in there, at least that way there wouldn't be too much background traffic.

Upvotes: 9

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