GitKraken – data kraken – Yet another application that tracks you?

2016-04-05

tl;dr: GitKraken does not check certificate for api.gitkraken.com , and submits an ID plus some usage statistics on every start.

Today, I was excited to try the just released GitKraken. After installing the AUR package (1.0.0-1) and launching the application, I was immediately asked to register. I entered some nonsense email and name and followed the tour.

GitKraken soon listed all my Git repository on my computer which is a cool feature. But I also got a bit suspicious: it could easily aggregate the repository names, submit it and link it to the registered user.

I decided to investigate the network traffic using mitmproxy. The challenge was to obtain the GitKraken traffic. Since I could not find a proxy configuration within GitKraken. I followed this tutorial to configure mitmproxy in the “Transparent Proxy” mode. I did not install the CA, though.

Registering

I registered in the application …



… a observed a request to https://api.gitkraken.com/register :



The server generates an id which is used for subsequent requests:



But, wait! Mitmproxy intercepts the HTTPS traffic and encrypts it again using its own certificate, which I did not trust. This is what Chromium showed while my traffic was going through mitmproxy:



This means that GitKraken does accept any certificate for api.gitkraken.com!

Confirmation

I clicked on the confirmation link sent via email ( https://api.gitkraken.com/activate/d810cfe7-c828-47af-860f-9e71cbd68ded/0746… , note the id from above). The application makes a request to https://api.gitkraken.com/phone-home to check the registration status:





Application start

After every start of the application, https://api.gitkraken.com/phone-home is requested again. Besides re-checking the activation status this aims at submitting usage/timing statistics, of course together with the id :





Summary