We all love transport security but it can get in the way of a good tcpdump. Unencrypted protocols like HTTP, DNS etc can be picked apart for debugging but anything running over SSL can be impenetrable. Of course, that's an advantage too: the end-to-end principle is dead for any common, unencrypted protocol. But we want to have our cake and eat it.

Wireshark (a common tool for dissecting packet dumps) has long had the ability to decrypt some SSL connections given the private key of the server, but the private key isn't always something that you can get hold of, or want to spread around. MITM proxies (like Fiddler) can sit in the middle of a connection and produce plaintext, but they also alter the connection: SPDY, client-certificates etc won't work through them (at least not without special support).

So here's another option: if you get a dev channel release of Chrome and a trunk build of Wireshark you can run Chrome with the environment variable SSLKEYLOGFILE set to, say, /home/foo/keylog . Then, in Wireshark's preferences for SSL, you can tell it about that key log file. As Chrome makes SSL connections, it'll dump an identifier and the connection key to that file and Wireshark can read those and decrypt SSL connections.

The format of the key log file is described here. There's an older format just for RSA ciphersuites that I added when Wireshark decrypted purely based on RSA pre-master secrets. However, that doesn't work with ECDHE ciphersuites (amongst others) so the newer format can be used to decrypt any connection. (You need the trunk build of Wireshark to support the newer format.) Chrome currently writes records of both formats.

This can also be coupled with spdy-shark to dissect SPDY connections.

Since key log support is part of NSS, support will hopefully end up in Firefox in the future.