How secure is SSL?

Question

How secure is SSL (Secure Socket Layer)? As in, how much will it take to crack a password sent through SSL?

Answer 1

Assuming everything is setup/secured properly and we're talking about 128-bit keys, significantly longer than the age of the universe.

I would note that previous cracks in SSL relied on "hole" in MD5, which caused some the method of validation to change..

I would also note, this doesn't free you from man-in-the-middle attacks, or even someone hijacking the private cert of the target company (note that private keys should be protected via a strong password though to mitigate such a risk and then the key revoked if such an event occurs). Read a high level overview on how SSL works here.