SSLCat

ISSLCat is a simple Unix utility that reads and writes data across an SSL enable network connection.
SSLCat accepts a hostname and optional port number (443 is used if none is specified) and attempts to form a SSLv2 connection to the specified host. If all goes well, data is read from stdin and sent across the encrypted connection, while incoming data from the encrypted connection is sent stdout.

Developer

Dave Armstrong

Usage

sslcat [ -Bd3T ] <host> [port]

Options

-B
Enabled debugging output.
-d
Drop connection on EOF from STDIN.
-3
Force use of SSLv3.
-T
Force use of TLSv1.

Examples

By using the echo command to produce a simple HTTP request and piping this through sslcat we can use standard Unix commands to process the result:

echo 'HEAD / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | sslcat hotmail.com | grep ^Server

The webserver running at www.sun.com doesn't like SSLv2 connection, so we need to add the -3 option to force the use of SSLv3:

echo 'HEAD / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | sslcat -3 sun.com | grep ^Server

Download

The latest version of SSLCat can be obtained from: