I have a PEM file provided to me and was told that it will be needed in establishing a SSL socket that connects to a c++ server for some API calls. Does anyone know how I can read in the PEM file and connect? I was also given the parapharse password.
You need a library that handles SSL. As John Ellinwood noted, some frameworks (such as Java 2 SE) offers these built-in, for others you'd need to use 3rd party libraries.
C developers often use openssl directly, but it can't be said to be easy and when using C++ there are several "gotchas" that are easy to fall into.
I suggest you use a C++ network library with support for SSL, such as QT's network library, or Poco NetSSL. See here for some tutorial documentation and here for the API documentation - you probably want to take a look at initializeClient which takes a PEM file directly.