No SslStream for NET compact framework

[moster67]

I have (had ) this little project of writing an application which among its tasks would need to connect to a server via telnet using OpenSSL as an Authentication method but I just found out that NETCF does not support SSL (apparently because the SslStream-class is not supported) and no one knows if it will be implemented in future releases.

If you believe I got it all wrong, please then let me know.

If you aware about any alternative solutions (open-source libraries or similar), please let me know.

Regards,
/moster67

[agraham]

According to "Microsoft Mobile Development Handbook" by Wigley,Moth and Foot, WM5.0 and later supports SSL over HTTP by just changing URLs to start with "https://" but "your Web server must have an X.509 server certificate which is used to authenticate the Web server ...".

It may be that WM2003 and .NET 1.0 also support this as Googling around I have found a query by someone "trying to hit an IBM web server (Apache-based I believe) via HttpWebRequest POST method over SSL ... The test is being done on VS .Net 2003 and the PPC 2003 emulator". The result of this query was that "there is a bug in http client that is exposed by the code you are using. Instead of setting req.ContentLength, you should set AllowWriteStreamBuffering to true." So it looks like it should also work through the HTTP libary though it may need a bit of intervention with the Door library.

I don't know if this helps you as this is not one of my areas of expertise.

[moster67]

Thank you Graham for your reply and interest.

I also read similar articles but it seems like most articles is speaking about SSL over HTTP so I don't know if that information can be applied to my scenario which involves connecting to a mail-server (using SMTP, POP3 or perhaps IMAP) using a TELNET-session (which requires SSL as authentication).

However, while googling I found something called "stunnel" which I believe (if I understood it correctly) could be handy (Stunnel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) although I still have to read more about it. I also found this article, related to Windows Mobile : http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~mgilbert/S_Imap.txt which seems to be interesting. However, I am unsure if this solution can be implemented using the Net-framework (and then of course Basic4PPC) or if one needs to do something in C++.

As you can see, I am rather confused. This topic is rather advanced for me and unfortunately no easy solutions seem to be available.

rgds,
moster67