Patent 9419942 was granted and assigned to Palo Alto Networks on August, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Techniques for destination domain extraction for secure protocols are disclosed. In some embodiments, destination domain extraction for secure protocols includes monitoring network communications between a client and a remote server; determining if the client sends a request to create a secure connection with the remote server (e.g., in which the network communications are initiating a setup for a secure protocol-based connection); and extracting a destination domain from the request to create the secure connection with the remote server. In some embodiments, the secure protocol is a secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol or transport layer security (TLS) protocol, and the destination domain is extracted from the server name indication (SNI) of a client hello message sent from the client to the remote server. In some embodiments, destination domain extraction for secure protocols further includes applying a policy (e.g., a security policy) based on the destination domain to filter traffic using a security device.