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Many IoT systems have 3rd-party APIs people have reverse-engineered so they can add custom integrations, but these all work by impersonating the app, receiving updates from the server.

If I'm on my local network and so is my smart-plug or door-bell or whatever, is there a way to intercept the outgoing traffic before it even gets to the server?

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This isn't really a IoT question, it's more a general networking question.

But yes, if you control the LAN then you can do nearly anything but the starting points would be:

  • DNS overriding so a hostname points to a local address
  • DNAT to intercept packets to a specific IP address and remap it to a local address

Both of these do rely on the system not using TLS/SSL to encrypt the traffic as you would need to present a certificate that matches the host the device is trying to connect to.

There can be ways round that, but things start to get a lot more complicated.

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  • I was surprised there don't seem to be any tags like homebrew or hacking tags, this is quite a big part of IoT. Would a question like mine targeted at a particular product be off-topic for this site?
    – Mr. Boy
    Oct 30, 2020 at 15:00

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