5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
9 First, let's establish that we often refer to TLS and SSL interchangeably as
10 SSL here. The current protocol is called TLS, it was called SSL a long time
13 There are several known reasons why a connection that involves SSL might
14 fail. This is a document that attempts to details the most common ones and
19 CA certs are used to digitally verify the server's certificate. You need a
20 "ca bundle" for this. See lots of more details on this in the SSLCERTS
23 CA bundle missing intermediate certificates
25 When using said CA bundle to verify a server cert, you will experience
26 problems if your CA cert does not have the certificates for the
27 intermediates in the whole trust chain.
31 Some broken servers fail to support the protocol negotiation properly that
32 SSL servers are supposed to handle. This may cause the connection to fail
33 completely. Sometimes you may need to explicitly select a SSL version to use
34 when connecting to make the connection succeed.
36 An additional complication can be that modern SSL libraries sometimes are
37 built with support for older SSL and TLS versions disabled!
41 Clients give servers a list of ciphers to select from. If the list doesn't
42 include any ciphers the server wants/can use, the connection handshake
45 curl has recently disabled the user of a whole bunch of seriously insecure
46 ciphers from its default set (slightly depending on SSL backend in use).
48 You may have to explicitly provide an alternative list of ciphers for curl
49 to use to allow the server to use a WEAK cipher for you.
51 Note that these weak ciphers are identified as flawed. For example, this
52 includes symmetric ciphers with less than 128 bit keys and RC4.
56 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-popov-tls-prohibiting-rc4-01
60 BEAST is the name of a TLS 1.0 attack that surfaced 2011. When adding means
61 to mitigate this attack, it turned out that some broken servers out there in
62 the wild didn't work properly with the BEAST mitigation in place.
64 To make such broken servers work, the --ssl-allow-beast option was
65 introduced. Exactly as it sounds, it re-introduces the BEAST vulnerability
66 but on the other hand it allows curl to connect to that kind of strange