Patent ID: 7953973

Claim:
A method for passively routing secure socket layer (SSL) encoded network traffic, the method comprising: (a) passively receiving a copy of SSL encoded network traffic; (b) passively parsing the received network traffic and generating an identical copy of the network traffic such that the network traffic is not decrypted and without interfering with the network traffic; (c) selecting a target output network device for transmission of the identical copy of the network traffic; and (d) transmitting the identical copy of the network traffic to an external network through the selected target output network device, wherein passively parsing the received network traffic is performed such that decryption of the network traffic is not required, passively parsing the received network traffic is performed without requiring access to SSL private keying information for decryption of the network traffic, passively parsing the received network traffic includes extracting a unique identifier from an unencrypted portion of an SSL ServerHello message of the network traffic, and selecting a target output network device includes selecting the target output network device based on the extracted unique identifier.