A Debian bug report [1] indicated that Links does not properly verify SSL certificates. If you visit a web site with an expired SSL certificate, Links will only display "SSL error" without any indication as to what the error was. This, in and of itself, is not a flaw however when testing, I found that when you go to a site with a valid SSL certificate, but for a different hostname (for example, if you go to https://alias.foo.com which might be a CNAME or a proxy for https://foo.com) Links will connect without any errors or warnings. Doing the same in a browser like Google Chrome, however, reports "You attempted to reach alias.foo.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as foo.com." and allows you to either proceed or not, before loading the site.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=694658