In the last 8 months, I’ve captured and analyzed 4.4 billion network packets from my home internet connection, representing 3833 GiB of data. Life basically occurs via the internet when you’re stuck at home. Facetime calls, streaming anime, browsing reddit, and even video conferencing for my job — all of it gets funneled into my custom network monitoring software for decoding, logging, and analysis. Needless to say, most internet communication uses encrypted TLS tunnels, which are opaque to passive network observers. However, there’s a ton of interesting details exposed in the metadata — as network engineers and application programmers, we’ve repeated this adage to ourselves countless times. However, few people have actually inspected their own internet traffic to confirm exactly what kind of data they’re exposing this way. Developing my own network traffic analysis software has helped me solidify my… more →