Peer SSL Certificate Verification ================================= Starting in 7.10, libcurl performs peer SSL certificate verification by default. This is done by installing a default CA cert bundle on 'make install' (or similar), that CA bundle package is used by default on operations against SSL servers. Alas, if you communicate with HTTPS servers using certificates that are signed by CAs present in the bundle, you will not notice any changed behavior and you will seamlessly get a higher security level on your SSL connections since you can be sure that the remote server really is the one it claims to be. If the remote server uses a self-signed certificate, or if you don't install curl's CA cert bundle or if it uses a certificate signed by a CA that isn't included in the bundle, then you need to do one of the following: 1. Tell libcurl to *not* verify the peer. With libcurl you disable with with curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE); With the curl command tool, you disable this with -k/--insecure. 2. Get a CA certificate that can verify the remote server and use the proper option to point out this CA cert for verification when connecting. For libcurl hackers: curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_CAPATH, capath); With the curl command tool: --cacert [file] Neglecting to use one of the above menthods when dealing with a server using a certficate that isn't signed by one of the certficates in the installed CA cert bundle, will cause SSL to report an error ("certificate verify failed") during the handshake and SSL will then refuse further communication with that server. This procedure has been deemed The Right Thing even though it adds this extra trouble for some users, since it adds security to a majority of the SSL connections that previously weren't really secure. It turned out many people were using previous versions of curl/libcurl without realizing the need for the CA cert options to get truly secure SSL connections.