socat port forwarding for https

Question

I can use socat for the port forwarding like this:

socat TCP4-LISTEN:8080 TCP4:123.456.789.12:80

In this case, it works perfectly: all http-requests to localhost:8080 will be redirected to 123.456.789.12:80.

But how can I use such forwarding for https-requests?

UPDATE: I need a single socat process between Firefox and remote server. socat is just a forwarder (proxy redirector), nothing more. Something like this:

Firefox -> socat -> server
       ------------>
           https

Answer 1

Normally https servers run on port 443, so maybe that is your issue?

Trying to browse through socat to google.com with https works, albeit with an SSL certificate warning:

socat TCP-LISTEN:8080,fork,reuseaddr TCP:google.com:443

(use fork and reuseaddr to allow multiple connections and fast ip:port reuse, but beaware of the caveats).

Now you can access https at google from a browser, just go to https://localhost:8080.