It'll take me a bit to go through stunnel enough to understand how I would use it, but aside from that... Only the password really needs any sort of encryption. I'm concerned that what is probably already a very... inefficient system may be made worse because everything sent in and out would be encrypted.

As to why I believe my current mechanism is inefficient... well I haven't done anything beyond Apache interaction prior to now and I'm suddenly working with sockets etc... It's not stupidity, it's just learning... heh.

While I'm here, I might as well put up the method I'm using and ask for input. What I have is essentially a block system which works through the POE::Filter::Block using prepended lengths. (I had another variation on this before, but I like this one better.) Inside the block is a 3 digit number specifying the purpose/type of the message, followed by the message itself.

In my opinion, it isn't a *bad* system, but it could be better... how I'm not sure yet, hence the learning part.

Anyway, thanks for the input, if you could show me an example of how you would use stunnel it could make things much simpler, but if not, I'll probably figure it out myself.