SSL Terminal

The SSL Connection plugin turns IO Ninja into a highly configurable raw SSL client-side terminal.

In the modern world, secure connections are everywhere. Browsing the web, watching video streams, shopping online, logging into remote accounts, controlling smart homes and IoT devices — all this and more is done over connections secured with the SSL protocol (SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer).

Please keep in mind, when we say SSL, what we actually mean is TLS (Transport Layer Security) — a more recent variation of the original SSL protocol; still, it's common to refer to all types of connections secured with the SSL/TLS protocol suite simply as SSL connections.

Unfortunately, there are not many tools available for debugging raw SSL connections. The most common way is to use the openssl command-line utility in the s_client mode to establish a connection and then communicate to the remote server by typing characters and inspecting replies being shown on the terminal console:

$ openssl s_client -connect ioninja.com:443

However, that's not very convenient and it imposes quite a few functional restrictions (e.g., you can't prepare a packet and send it all at once, and it's hard to send and receive non-textual characters).

The SSL Connection plugin fills the existing gap.

Now, IO Ninja can be used for convenient GUI-based debugging of raw SSL connections. You can:

Use the whole range of IO Ninja logging and transmitting capabilities;
Choose the SSL cipher suite;
Specify client-side SSL certificates;
Choose whether to verify server-side SSL certificates...
...and specify a set of CAs for verification;
Re-connect if connection is lost;
Specify local address to connect from;
Control low-level TCP options (Nagle, TCP RST, keep-alives).

But There's More!

In addition to all of the SSL related greatness that the SSL Connection plugin offers, IO Ninja features a series of platform features that can make working with SSL not just easy, but actually enjoyable:

Powerful & Beautiful Logging Engine

The Ninja Scroll logging engine is the heart of IO Ninja! It offers many unique and useful features you won't find in other SSL terminals, such as interleaving binary data with informational messages for a clear timeline of events, switching between hex-view and plain-text view of binary data, a regex markup engine for highlighting data based on regular expressions, and many others!

Versatile Transmission Facilities

IO Ninja features convenient and powerful tools for preparing SSL packets before transmission. We offer a plain text editor with support for C ESC-sequences to encode special characters, a modern Unicode-enabled hex editor, and a file transmit feature.

A history of recently transmitted SSL packets is maintained, and you can also build your own libraries of commonly used packets — then send those packets with a mouse click!

Scriptability

With the Script Pane, you can generate SSL packets programmatically, wait for and react to SSL events, and automatically reply to incoming data, etc.

For more complex binary packets, you can describe the structure and methods for updating checksums or other auto-calculated fields as a Packet Template, then conveniently fill in the fields in a property grid.