The first time __mitmproxy__ or __mitmdump__ is started, the following set of certificate files for a dummy Certificate Authority are created in the config directory (~/.mitmproxy by default):

mitmproxy-ca.pem | The private key and certificate in PEM format.
mitmproxy-ca-cert.pem | The certificate in PEM format. Use this to distribute to most non-Windows platforms.
mitmproxy-ca-cert.p12 | The certificate in PKCS12 format. For use on Windows.

This CA is used for on-the-fly generation of dummy certificates for SSL interception. Since your browser won't trust the __mitmproxy__ CA out of the box (and rightly so), you will see an SSL cert warning every time you visit a new SSL domain through __mitmproxy__. When you're testing a single site through a browser, just accepting the bogus SSL cert manually is not too much trouble, but there are a number of cases where you will want to configure your testing system or browser to trust the __mitmproxy__ CA as a signing root authority: - If you are testing non-browser software that checks SSL cert validity using the system certificate store. - You are testing an app that makes non-interactive (JSONP, script src, etc.) requests to SSL resources. Another workaround in this case is to manually visit the page through the browser, and add a certificate exception. - You just don't want to deal with the hassle of continuously adding cert exceptions. Installing the mitmproxy CA --------------------------- * [Firefox](@!urlTo("certinstall/firefox.html")!@) * [OSX](@!urlTo("certinstall/osx.html")!@) * [Windows 7](@!urlTo("certinstall/windows7.html")!@) * [iPhone/iPad](@!urlTo("certinstall/ios.html")!@)