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Most IT people are somewhat familiar with Wireshark. It is a traffic analyzer, that helps you learn how networking works, diagnose problems and much more.
One of the problems with the way Wireshark works is that it can’t easily analyze encrypted traffic, like TLS. It used to be if you had the private key(s) you could feed them into Wireshark and it would decrypt the traffic on the fly, but it only worked when using RSA for the key exchange mechanism. As people have started to embrace forward secrecy this broke, as having the private key is no longer enough derive the actual session key used to decrypt the data. The other problem with this is that a private key should not or can not leave the client, server, or HSM it is in. This lead me to coming up with very contrived ways of man-in-the-middling myself to decrypt the traffic(e.g. sslstrip or mitmproxy).
Session Key Logging to the Rescue!
Well my friends I’m here to tell you that there is an easier way! It turns out that Firefox and Chrome both support logging the symmetric session key used to encrypt TLS traffic to a file. You can then point Wireshark at said file and presto! decrypted TLS traffic.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @08:10PM
Note these are transient TLS session keys, not RSA private keys they're talking about.