Installation

Installing SSH-MITM is the first step to leveraging its capabilities for your technical projects. This guide will provide you with the information and resources you need to get SSH-MITM up and running on your system.

SSH-MITM offers flexible and convenient installation options, including pre-built packages and package managers such as Flatpak, snap, pip, pipenv, AppImage or Nixpkgs.

These options provide a simple and efficient way for users to get SSH-MITM installed and ready to use for various purposes such as malware analysis, forensics, security audits, and more.

Official distributions

Official distributions of SSH-MITM represent the most recent and up-to-date versions of the software, directly maintained and approved by the SSH-MITM developers. These are the releases that see regular updates, ensuring users have access to the latest features, security patches, and improvements.

Flatpak

Install SSH-MITM as Flatpak from Flathub:

# install Flatpak
$ flatpak install flathub at.ssh_mitm.server

# run SSH-MITM from Flatpak
$ flatpak run at.ssh_mitm.server

snap

If you use snap, you can install it with:

$ sudo snap install ssh-mitm

AppImage

If you use the AppImage, you can install it as:

$ wget https://github.com/ssh-mitm/ssh-mitm/releases/latest/download/ssh-mitm-x86_64.AppImage
$ chmod +x ssh-mitm*.AppImage

pip

If you use pip, you can install it with:

$ python3 -m pip install ssh-mitm

If you are using a macOS version that comes with Python 2, run pip3 instead of pip.

If installing using python3 -m pip install --user, you must add the user-level bin directory to your PATH environment variable in order to launch ssh-mitm. If you are using a Unix derivative (FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, macOS), you can do this by running export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH".

pipenv

If you use pipenv, you can install it as:

$ pipenv install ssh-mitm
$ pipenv shell

When using pipenv, in order to launch ssh-mitm, you must activate the project’s virtualenv. For example, in the directory where pipenv’s Pipfile and Pipfile.lock live (i.e., where you ran the above commands):

$ pipenv shell
$ ssh-mitm server

Alternatively, you can run ssh-mitm server inside the virtualenv with

$ pipenv run ssh-mitm server

Community supported distributions

Community supported distributions of SSH-MITM, while immensely valuable, might not always be as current as the official ones. These versions are maintained by the broader community and can sometimes lag behind in incorporating the latest updates. They might offer unique configurations or adaptations tailored to specific needs, but there could be a trade-off in terms of having the most recent enhancements.

Nixpkgs

For Nix or NixOS is a package available. The lastest release is usually present in the unstable channel.

$ nix-env -iA nixos.ssh-mitm

Installation problems

If your computer is behind corporate proxy or firewall, you may encounter HTTP and SSL errors due to the proxy or firewall blocking connections to widely-used servers. For example, you might see this error if pip cannot connect to its own repositories:

WARNING: Retrying (Retry(total=4, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by
'NewConnectionError('<pip._vendor.urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x7ff04f4dbeb0>:
Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 101] netork not reachable')': /simple/ssh-mitm/

Here are some widely-used sites that host packages in the Python open-source ecosystems. Your network administrator may be able to allow http and https connections to these domains:

pypi.org
pythonhosted.org
github.com

Alternatively, you can specify a proxy user (usually a domain user with password), that is allowed to communicate via network. This can be easily achieved by setting two common environment variables: HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY. These variables are automatically used by many open-source tools (like pip) if set correctly.

# For Linux / MacOS
export HTTP_PROXY=http://USER:PWD@proxy.company.com:PORT
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://USER:PWD@proxy.company.com:PORT

In case you can communicate via HTTP, but installation with pip fails on connectivity problems to HTTPS servers, you can disable using SSL for pip.

Warning

Disabling SSL in communication is generally not recommended and involves potential security risks.

The approach here is to mark repository servers as trusted hosts, which means SSL communication will not be required for downloading Python libraries.

# Install ssh-mitm (without SSL)
$ python3 -m pip install --trusted-host pypi.org --trusted-host files.pythonhosted.org ssh-mitm

Using the tips from above, you can handle many network problems related to installing Python libraries.