Implementing/Using SSL within VB6 for TCP communications ? 1

[Nimroduk]

Hi all,

Lucky old me has been tasked with suring up an existing TCP based Client/Server application so that it can be used across the WWW.

The application was initially used to move sensitive data (in real-time*) between applications on the same LAN. The business has now grown and the application has to shift the same sensitive data (in real-time*) across the web to multiple sites.

I've Googled here, there and everywhere but I cannot find anything useful on implementing self-signed SSL encryption within VB6. I did stumble across an ActiveX control but I was hoping to integrate something like OpenSSL with the existing code/architecture. Surely someone, somewhere has tried ? Or am I barking up completely the wrong tree ?


Oh and as an aside; my idea of deploying VPN has already been shot down in flames



* in real-time means "as quickly as possible"

 

[dilettante]

What about using something like an SSH server at the server end and PLink at each client to establish SSH tunnels for your client/server application to operate over? This can be secured via server-created keys with the Pageant utility that's part of the PuTTY suite.

How to setup a SSH tunnel to access MySQL from outside gives one description of how this might be done. Your client application could "shell" PLink and monitor it, though you'd probably want to do something fancier than just using the VB Shell() function.

The freeSSHd product is a free and fairly clean (no ugly Cygwin required) Windows SSH server.


The only real alternative would be to move to another TCP component that supports SSL/TLS since VPN has been eliminated.

 

[Nimroduk]

I've had a play and its not a bad solution at all. My only reservation is having to rely on a third party solution for establishing and maintaining the tunnel; I'd prefer to have that all in the app.