TODO: Move to software page Socat is a commandline network tool akin to [[netcat]]. It supports SSL, IPv6 and several more protocols. It can come in handy when attempting to sniff traffic that has to speak SSL because setting up a cleartext to SSL proxy is relatively straightforward. =TCP to STDIN=To create a classic TCP listening daemon, similar to <code>netcat -l</code>, use a variation of the following command.<pre>$ socat TCP-LISTEN:8080 stdout</pre> =Cleartext to SSL Tunnel for DyKnow=One can create a plaintext to SSL proxy with socat, useful for performing a man-in-the-middle attack to study network traffic when there is an SSL-only server, but the client application has a vanilla TCP mode available. To do so, use a variant of the following command, originally used to look at [[DyKnow]]'s traffic to [[Virginia Tech]] servers.<pre>$ socat tcp4-listen:1337,fork openssl:dyknow.lt.vt.edu:443,cafile=/etc/ssl/certs/GlobalSign_Root_CA.pem</pre> [[Category:Needs restorationPending deletion]]