i suggest you take a look at the Net::SSLeay module. to quote the perldocs:

This module offers some high level convinience functions for accessing web pages on SSL servers, a sslcat() function for writing your own clients, and finally access to the SSL api of SSLeay package so you can write servers or clients for more complicated applications.

Crypt::SSLeay is a support module for LWP. to quote its perldocs:

Work on Crypt::SSLeay has been continued only to provide https support for the LWP - libwww perl libraries. If you want access to the OpenSSL API via perl, check out Sampo's Net::SSLeay.

i've never used any of this on HP-UX, so i can't say for certain that your problem doesn't lie elsewhere, but i would at least give it a shot if i were you.

note: Net::SSLeay is not an LWP module, so you don't get all the nice stuff like HTTP::Request, HTTP::Cookies, or LWP::UserAgent. you have to build and parse HTTP headers yourself. there may be some way around this, but the module is written not to use an LWP interface and so requires you to learn Yet Another set of functions.

but hey, if it does the job, i'm less apt to fault it for an idiosyncratic interface.