I hope you don't mind me necroing this old topic but I solved the exact same problem successfully by forking the process this way:

In the child process I then upgrade the client socket to SSL, contact the server and relay data between the two. Whatever info I need to send back to the parent process I can just print to STDOUT. The parent process has a very tight main loop switching between accept()'ing new connections and using IO::Select to determine which $pipe sockets are ready for non-blocking reads.

In another project of mine (not SSL related) I went a little further and established a plain two-way socket between the two processes and used non-blocking/select based sysread/syswrite on those as well. Non-blocking sockets between forked processes are actually a lot of fun :-)

Admittedly, the forking model does have its limitations when it comes to scaling, but it's relatively simple to get up and running and I found it quite sufficient for doing simple traffic inspection.