eBPF Practical Tutorial: Capturing SSL/TLS Plain Text Using uprobe
With the widespread use of TLS in modern network environments, tracing microservices RPC messages has become increasingly challenging. Traditional traffic sniffing techniques often face limitations in accessing only encrypted data, preventing a genuine observation of the original communication content. This restriction poses significant obstacles to system debugging and analysis.
However, a new solution is now available. Through the use of eBPF technology and its capability to perform probing in user space, a method has emerged to regain plain text data, allowing us to intuitively view the pre-encrypted communication content. Nevertheless, each application might utilize different libraries, and each library comes in multiple versions, introducing complexity to the tracking process.
In this tutorial, we will guide you through an eBPF tracing technique that spans across various user-space SSL/TLS libraries. This technique not only allows simultaneous tracing of user-space libraries like GnuTLS and OpenSSL but also significantly reduces maintenance efforts for new library versions compared to previous methods.
