Native SSL Support for WINAPI

Question

I'm trying to make a simple IRC client, using the Winsock API, to which I want to add SSL support. Currently I just use overlapped socket I/O like this:

SOCKET sock = WSASocketW(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP, NULL, 0x02, 0x01);

if (!sock)
    return;

struct sockaddr_in ircClient;

memcpy(&ircClient.sin_addr, he->h_addr_list[0], he->h_length);
ircClient.sin_family = AF_INET;
ircClient.sin_port = wPort;

WSAEVENT hDataEvent = WSA_INVALID_EVENT;

if (WSAConnect(sock, (sockaddr*)&ircClient, sizeof(ircClient), 0, 0, 0, 0) > 0) {
    closesocket(sock);
    return;
}

if (wsWSAGetLastError() != 0) {
    closesocket(sock);
    return;
}

Now, as I understand, for SSL support, I need to do SSL handshake after WSAConnect(). I found old Internet posts saying there are no SSL support in Winsock. It is now is year 2017, and 95% of websites work with SSL. Is there still no way to do this? I have found Using Secure Socket Extensions, but it is not SSL.

Answer 1

I've done years ago some SSL/TLS stuff over standard TCP connections using native windows API, but I'm not familiar with this specific "secure socket extension".

I can recommend using SSPI. It doesn't automatically transform your socket to SSL, but can be used pretty easy for generating SSL request/response/data packets on request. Look for InitializeSecurityContext for more info.