M1020: SSL/TLS Inspection
SSL/TLS inspection involves decrypting encrypted network traffic to examine its content for signs of malicious activity. This capability is crucial for detecting threats that use encryption to evade detection, such as phishing, malware, or data exfiltration. After inspection, the traffic is re-encrypted and forwarded to its destination. This mitigation can be implemented through the following measures:
Deploy SSL/TLS Inspection Appliances:
- Implement SSL/TLS inspection solutions to decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic. - Ensure appliances are placed at critical network choke points for maximum coverage.
Configure Decryption Policies:
- Define rules to decrypt traffic for specific applications, ports, or domains. - Avoid decrypting sensitive or privacy-related traffic, such as financial or healthcare websites, to comply with regulations.
Integrate Threat Intelligence:
- Use threat intelligence feeds to correlate inspected traffic with known indicators of compromise (IOCs).
Integrate with Security Tools:
- Combine SSL/TLS inspection with SIEM and NDR tools to analyze decrypted traffic and generate alerts for suspicious activity. - Example Tools: Splunk, Darktrace
Implement Certificate Management:
- Use trusted internal or third-party certificates for traffic re-encryption after inspection. - Regularly update certificate authorities (CAs) to ensure secure re-encryption.
Monitor and Tune:
- Continuously monitor SSL/TLS inspection logs for anomalies and fine-tune policies to reduce false positives.
Security context for executives and security teams
M1020: SSL/TLS Inspection describes SSL/TLS inspection involves decrypting encrypted network traffic to examine its content for signs of malicious activity. This capability is crucial for detecting threats that use encryption to evade detection, such as phishing, malware, or data exfiltration. After inspection, the traffic is re-encrypted and forwarded to its destination. This mitigation can be implemented through the following measures: Deploy SSL/TLS Inspection Appliances: - Implement SSL/TLS inspection solutions to decrypt and inspect encrypted tr...
Executive priority
M1020: SSL/TLS Inspection is an official MITRE ATT&CK mitigation. Glexia treats it as defensive behavior context for prioritizing monitoring, control validation, and response planning without using the object by itself as an attribution claim.
Technical view
Security teams should validate M1020: SSL/TLS Inspection by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (the mapped ATT&CK tactic context), supported platforms (the platforms named in the official object), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.
Likely telemetry
- Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata
Detection direction
- Validate whether M1020: SSL/TLS Inspection appears in your detection coverage and tabletop scenarios.
- Use the object to align executive risk language with SOC, incident response, and detection engineering work.
- Do not treat ATT&CK relationship context as attribution without corroborating evidence.
Mitigation priorities
- Map the object to existing controls and identify missing telemetry or response ownership.
- Prioritize mitigations that reduce exposure on the listed platforms and tactics.
- Review adjacent ATT&CK relationships before changing policy, detections, or reporting language.
Additional notes and limits
Baseline Glexia take generated from the official MITRE ATT&CK STIX object, source hash, tactics, platforms, and detection fields. It is safe to replace with a richer model-generated take for the same source hash later.
This baseline take is source-grounded and schema-validated, but it does not include environment-specific telemetry, incident evidence, or threat-intelligence corroboration.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
SSL/TLS Inspection
SSL/TLS inspection involves decrypting encrypted network traffic to examine its content for signs of malicious activity. This capability is crucial for detecting threats that use encryption to evade detection, such as phishing, malware, or data exfiltration. After inspection, the traffic is re-encrypted and forwarded to its destination. This mitigation can be implemented through the following measures:
Deploy SSL/TLS Inspection Appliances:
- Implement SSL/TLS inspection solutions to decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic. - Ensure appliances are placed at critical network choke points for maximum coverage.
Configure Decryption Policies:
- Define rules to decrypt traffic for specific applications, ports, or domains. - Avoid decrypting sensitive or privacy-related traffic, such as financial or healthcare websites, to comply with regulations.
Integrate Threat Intelligence:
- Use threat intelligence feeds to correlate inspected traffic with known indicators of compromise (IOCs).
Integrate with Security Tools:
- Combine SSL/TLS inspection with SIEM and NDR tools to analyze decrypted traffic and generate alerts for suspicious activity. - Example Tools: Splunk, Darktrace
Implement Certificate Management:
- Use trusted internal or third-party certificates for traffic re-encryption after inspection. - Regularly update certificate authorities (CAs) to ensure secure re-encryption.
Monitor and Tune:
- Continuously monitor SSL/TLS inspection logs for anomalies and fine-tune policies to reduce false positives.
How security teams should use this page
Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.
Techniques used
This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.
| Domain | ID | Name | Relationship / procedure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | T1090.004 | Domain FrontingSub-technique | If it is possible to inspect HTTPS traffic, the captures can be analyzed for connections that appear to be domain fronting. |
| Enterprise | T1573.002 | Asymmetric CryptographySub-technique | SSL/TLS inspection can be used to see the contents of encrypted sessions to look for network-based indicators of malware communication protocols. |
| Enterprise | T1573 | Encrypted Channel | SSL/TLS inspection can be used to see the contents of encrypted sessions to look for network-based indicators of malware communication protocols. |
| Enterprise | T1090 | Proxy | If it is possible to inspect HTTPS traffic, the captures can be analyzed for connections that appear to be domain fronting. |
All related ATT&CK context
Object version and sync metadata
The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates.
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
| Release | Bundle imported | Object version | Modified | Status | Raw hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.2 | 1.1 | Current bundle | 31b4b00c4184… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.1 | Older bundle | 31b4b00c4184… |
Mirrored ATT&CK source object
The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.
External references and citations
MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.
- [1]mitre-attackM1020Open source URL
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