Show HN: Using eBPF to see through encryption without a proxy

Hi HN, I'm Tyler Flint, one of the creators of qtap.

For a while now, my team and I at Qpoint.io have been grappling with the challenge of understanding what's actually happening inside the encrypted traffic leaving our production systems. Modern apps rely heavily on third-party APIs (think payment processors, data providers, etc.), but once TLS kicks in, figuring out exactly what data is being sent, identifying PII exposure, or debugging integration issues becomes incredibly difficult without resorting to complex and often brittle solutions.

Traditional approaches like forward proxies require terminating TLS (MITM), managing certificates, and often introduce performance bottlenecks or single points of failure. Network firewalls usually operate at L3/L4 and lack payload visibility. We felt there had to be a better way.

That's why we built qtap. It's a lightweight agent that uses eBPF to tap into network traffic at the kernel level. The key idea is to hook into common TLS libraries (like OpenSSL) before encryption and after decryption. This gives us deep visibility into the actual request/response payloads of HTTPS/TLS traffic without needing to terminate the connection or manage certs. Because it leverages eBPF, the performance impact is minimal compared to traditional methods.

With qtap, we can now see exactly which external services our apps are talking to, inspect the payloads for debugging or security auditing (e.g., spotting accidental PII leaks), monitor API performance/errors for third-party dependencies, and get a much clearer picture of our egress traffic patterns.

We've found this approach really powerful for improving reliability and security posture. We've packaged qtap as a Linux Binary, Docker container, and Helm chart for deployment.

This is still evolving, but we're excited about the potential of using eBPF for this kind of deep, yet non-intrusive, visibility.

We'd love to get the HN community's feedback:

    Do you face similar challenges monitoring encrypted egress traffic?
    What are your thoughts on using eBPF for this compared to other methods?
    Any suggestions or potential use cases we haven't considered?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43928118

Points: 116

# Comments: 34

https://github.com/qpoint-io/qtap