Harmless hacking: Trick an application into thinking that a local file has actually come from a server

Question

I've got a flash application (not written by me) which is accessing a configuration file which present on a http server. There are a lot of settings in the config file which seem to affect its behaviour.

I'm not interested in decompiling the swf file or getting too deep into this.

Basically I would like to try to alter the behaviour of the application by making it pick up a modified version of the configuration file instead of the one on the server. Is there a way to do this easily (perhaps a firefox extension like firebug?).

Basically when the application requests http://server/config.xml I want something that gets in the way and returns ~/myconfig.xml instead.

Answer 1

You may be able to use a web-filtering proxy like Proxomitron to do that for you. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but as I recall it let you define text-matching rules that it applied to http requests and responses. You should be able to use it to redirect that one request to a local file or to a file on a server you control.

Answer 2

If this is simply for debugging and discovery purposes, I would change your host file to have the domain in the http request point to your own machine and then you can put a modified config on your own system.

Answer 3

If you want http://server.com/path/to/config.xml to load your own config.xml:

if you're on windows run: notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

in that file add: 127.0.0.1 server.com

This will make any program look for server.com on your machine. If the flash file is also on server.com, load it first, then change hosts.

Install a webserver on your machine (apache) and put config.xml into c:\apache_install_dir\htdocs\path\to\