Solitude : A Privacy Analysis Tool That Enables Anyone To Conduct Their Own Privacy Investigations

Solitude is a privacy analysis tool that enables anyone to conduct their own privacy investigations. Whether a curious novice or a more advanced researcher, Solitude makes the process of evaluating user privacy within an app accessible for everyone.

Important Note

Prior to installing Solitude it should be noted that Solitude should be run on a private network that is trusted. The way that the Solitude web app interface is currently built is under the assumption that users will run the tool on a private trusted network.

A note on certificate pinning

If you are using Solitude for testing mobile apps (we hope you are!) then it should be clear that if you are using a non jail broken device that you may not be able to capture all HTTP traffic if the application or third party SDKS emeded into the app use certficate pinning. Certificate pinning is a security mechanism that ensures that the server the app is communicating with is that in which it expects. Apps and SDKS often times use certificate pinning to protect their apps in the event a certificate authority is compromised and malicious certificates are issued by an attacker which may allow the attacker to observe or modify TLS traffic from the app to the app servers. Solitude does not support certificate pinning bypasses. We leave this up to the users of Solitude. With that being said we do not ever ever recommend jailbreaking or rooting your own personal mobile device. If you are interested in using a jailbroken or rooted phone you should use a test device with test data to test apps.

Install for Mac OS X

• git clone https://github.com/nccgroup/Solitude
• Install Docker
• docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml build
• docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml up
• Browse to http://localhost:5000 and follow the instructions to start the VPN server and configure your mobile device with a VPN profile and mitm proxy certificate.

Install locally (without docker-compose) on Mac OS X

• Install Docker
• brew install mysql
• Run the mysql docker container: (do this first before installing Solitude as it takes a minute for the container to start)

docker run -p 3306:3306 -d --name mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=solitude mysql (change the default password here and see instructions below to change database configs)

• git clone https://github.com/nccgroup/Solitude
• cd Solitude && python3 -m venv venv
• source venv/bin/activate
• pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• python3 run.py
• Browse to http://localhost:5000 and configure browser to proxy all HTTP traffic through localhost:8080

Install for Linux

• Install Docker and Docker-compose
• docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml build
• docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml up
• Browse to http://localhost:5000 and follow the instructions to start the VPN server and configure your mobile device with a VPN profile and mitm proxy certificate.

Install locally (without docker-compose) on Linux

• Install Docker
• Run the mysql docker container (do this first before installing Solitude as it takes a minute for the container to start)

docker run -p 3306:3306 -d --name mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=solitude mysql (change the default password here and see instructions below to change database configs)

• git clone https://github.com/nccgroup/Solitude
• cd Solitude && python3 -m venv venv
• source venv/bin/activate
• sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
• pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• python3 run.py
• Browse to http://localhost:5000 and configure browser to proxy all HTTP traffic through localhost:8080

Database Config

To change the default database password. Edit the .env file to the password of your choosing.

Configure Solitude

Configure any of the data you want traced in the myrules.json file. If a match is found in any HTTP traffic being emitted from the web application or mobile app the configured data will be displayed in the web interface and the domain that the data with whom that data is being shared with.

How does Solitude work?

Solitude runs an OpenVPN server inside of a docker container which then fowards all HTTP traffic to a an HTTP interecpting proxy (mitmproxy) through a feature that makes use of the add-on API in mitmproxy.

How does Solitude searching work?

Solitude makes use of Yara rules to search through all the HTTP traffic that you proxy through the tool. Yara rules while relatively easy to write can be tedious so solitude does some of the heavy lifting for you. In the myrules.json file, define a key and value you pair of the type of data you would like to search for. There are some examples provided in the myrules.json but feel free to add your own data. The key should be the type of data you are searching for such as “My phone number”. This key is used for the output generated when a match is found. The value should be the exact data you would like to match. Take into account different data formats so creating more entry for each piece of data might be necessary. For example a phone number or birthday might have multiple formats. 03-03-1991 or March, 3rd 1991. If you want to add new rules in the JSON file Solitude will generate Yara rules for you each time you start the proxy.

Example: "phoneNumber": "555-555-5555", "Address": "123 Sutter Street, San Francisco 94105"

Solitude Features

• base64 and url recursive decoding (requests that are encoded say base64>url>base64 can be decoded and searched through)
• protobuf support (decodes the first layer of any protobuf request)
• Searches for MD5, SHA1, SHA256 of all data defined in myrules.json
• Built-in GPS, internal IP Address and Mac Address regular expression searches