Listening to SSL with socat

I wanted to dump the headers for a http request over ssl today. Pulled out socat and this command and it seemed to work quite nicely.

socat OPENSSL-LISTEN:4433,cert=server.crt,key=server.key,verify=0 -

You will need to create server.crt and server.key and if you don't want the other end to complain then they should be a valid keypair.

Socat is a really nice tool that exposes the power of Unix sockets and allows you to connect anything together. In this case a tcp socket with ssl support and the standard out. But it could be a UDP port and a serial cable for all all socat cares. A really nice tool.