Initiate SSL secured TCP connections to remote services

By convention, common protocols use a defined port, like 80 for HTTP or 443 for HTTPS.

You can use nmap to find out what service is running behind a given port, and most often see some details about it. This can be helpful if servers don't offe...

If you need to make an HTTPS connection to a host which uses an expired certificate, do not disable certificate verifications entirely. Doing that enables e.g. man in the middle attacks.
If you accept only a single expired and known certifica...

sslscan is a nice tool to show details about TLS/SSL connections:

~> sslscan some-host-at.makandra.de

Testing SSL server some-host-at.makandra.de on port 443

  Supported Server Cipher(s):
    Failed    SSLv3  256 bits  ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GC...

TLS/SSL certificates are often used for HTTPS traffic. Occasionally a service may also use their TLS certificate to support public-key encrypting data (e.g. when it is part of the URI and visible to the user, but contains sensitive information).

...

Sometimes, you may want to open up a second database connection, to a read slave or another database. When doing that, you must make sure you don't overwrite an existing connection.

The problem

While this may look good, it will act...

Say you want to move a git repository from one remote (perhaps Github) to another (perhaps Gitlab).

If you have the repo checked out, you still should make sure to mirror all branches of the old remote, not only those you happen to have checked o...

Here is how to start your Rails application to accept both HTTP and HTTPS in development.

1. gem install passenger

2. Create a [self-signed SSL certificate](https://makandracards.com/makandra/15901-howto-create-a-self-signed-certificate...

In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In orde...

Sometimes you need to monitor a connection from your machine to a specific, single host or network in order to identify which network hop between your machine and the target causes trouble. You can use the following shell script to easily achieve ...

This is an extract from the linked article. It shows an approach on how to implement encrypted passwords with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

For most applications it's enough to use a hashed...