We’ve recently updated our SSLRobot TLS/SSL checking tool with three main changes:

1. It now uses the locally installed root CA certificates (Windows or MacOS) to support servers that use custom in-house generated SSL certificates.
2. The Network section displays detailed information about the operating system’s proxy configuration.
3. It’s free to use with any host name although the extended features such as save, print and email require a license key or an in-app purchase from the Mac App Store.

Item 2) means that SSLRobot can be a useful tool for debugging and verifying proxy settings even if you don’t need to check the SSL/TLS configuration. Just type a host name into SSLRobot and expand the Network section to see the system proxy configuration.

When there’s no proxy settings on a Mac or PC you’ll see something like this in the Network section:

and with a manually configured proxy you’ll see this:

The proxy data fields show how the proxy was configured and in this case that NTLM authentication was used. It also shows if a PAC (proxy auto config) file was used to specify the proxy on a per host basis:

If SSLRobot detects any potential problems it displays a warning, e.g. the WPAD file location could not be found when using proxy auto-detection :

HttpWatch shows a summary of the SSL connections used for HTTPS requests:

While this information is useful, our customers have asked for more detail about certificates, protocol versions and other aspects of the server’s configuration. There are online SSL tools that can do this but tests are often slow and cannot be used to investigate servers on local networks or in test environments.

To address these issues we have developed SSLRobot – a desktop (Mac and PC) based SSL scanning tool that quickly checks secure servers:

The tool highlights possible configuration issues that could compromise the security of a secure web server:

We’ve integrated this tool directly into HttpWatch (version 10.0.56+) so you can start a check from the SSL tab or URL context menu:

If you have a license for the current version of HttpWatch Professional you can request a free license key for SSLRobot by visiting the following page:

https://store.httpwatch.com/free-sslrobot-license/