My name is Philipp C. Heckel and I write about nerdy things.

Posts Categorized / Android


  • Jul 05 / 2013
  • 62
Android, Mobile, Security

How To: Sniff the WhatsApp password from your Android phone or iPhone

WhatsApp is a very popular SMS-like messenger for smartphones, but it’s unfortunately only available for smartphones right now. If you want to use other tools or write web applications that send or receive WhatsApp messages (e.g. WhatsAPI, was at https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI, site now defunct, July 2019), you have to find a way to sniff the WhatsApp password from your smartphone. Until recently, this password was just an MD5 hash of your IMEI (or MAC address), but that has changed when that was uncovered. Since then, the WhatsApp server assigns a password to each device/account when it first registers.

This tutorial demonstrates how to capture the WhatsApp password of your WhatsApp account using the SSL/TLS proxy mitmproxy. Once you have this password, you can use it to communicate with the WhatsApp servers directly or via a framework. This is the first part of a two-part tutorial. The second part demonstrates how to send and receive WhatsApp messages via PHP.

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  • Jul 01 / 2013
  • 68
Android, Linux, Security

How To: Use mitmproxy to read and modify HTTPS traffic

Capturing HTTP and HTTPS traffic on your own machine is quite simple: Using tools like Wireshark or Firebug, sniffing the local connections is only a matter of seconds. Capturing and/or altering the HTTP/HTTPS traffic of other machines in your network (such as your smartphone or other laptops) on the other hand is not so easy. Especially sniffing into SSL-secured HTTPS-connections seems impossible at first. Using mitmproxy, however, makes this possible in a very easy and straight forward way.

This small tutorial shows how to use mitmproxy to transparently sniff into and alter (!) HTTPS connections of your phone or other devices in your network.

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  • Jun 10 / 2012
  • 22
Android, Mobile, Programming

Android Example: Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging

I recently wrote my first little app for my Android smartphone and I was surprised how easy it was. Being familiar with regular Java, learning the new Android APIs was very simple for the most part. However, there was one thing that wasn’t particularly straight forward: communicating between an Activity, i.e. the user interface, and a background Service started by the application. After many hours, I found some sample code on Stack Overflow which I used to create a very generic reusable solution to start, stop and communicate with your own Service implementation.

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