Sniffing an SSL connection on your local machine?

[kleptophobiac]

I'd like to watch an SSL communication, with data exchanged, that occurs on my local machine. Is there an app that can intercept this?

Obviously you can't pull this off somewhere between the two endpoints, but since I'm trying to diagnose a problem with a web application, I can run the sniffer on the client machine.

Maybe a browser that will dump data it transacts?

EDIT: ssldump didn't work out for me... I used ethereal in promisc mode on the client machine to capture the packets.

 

[DragonNOA1]

I used ethereal in promisc mode on the client machine to capture the packets.

Then you solved your problem, correct? I was going to suggest ethereal.

 

[SJConsultant]

Then you solved your problem, correct? I was going to suggest ethereal.

SSL encryption happens before the sniffer can "sniff" it thus all you would see is encrypted traffic. So in essence, ethereal or any other packet sniffer will not do the job he wants to accomplish.

kleptophobiac , what is the problem you are trying to resolve?

 

[kleptophobiac]

Then you solved your problem, correct? I was going to suggest ethereal.

No, I mean I used ethereal to capture the data for ssldump rather than using ssldump itself. Sorry for the confusion.

As for what I'm trying to fix:
I'm trying to make a frontend to a intranet site that will save me a boatload of time. The site is designed really stupidly and causes me a great deal of grief to use. It uses SSL and an HTTP post to authenticate. It's an ASP page. I'm trying to use java with Apache's httpclient to simulate a browser, using the client to scrape information from the site and put it in a format that is useful to me.

When I try to download the content of the page with the post method, I get a http internal server error, saying that access is denied. I can't for the life of me figure out why access is denied, so I wanted to look at my SSL communication versus the web page's SSL communication to see how it was different and what I needed to fix.