I'm trying to curl the https website in the following way

$ curl -v https://thepiratebay.se/

However it fails with the error.

* About to connect() to thepiratebay.se port 443 (#0)
*   Trying 173.245.61.146...
* connected
* Connected to thepiratebay.se (173.245.61.146) port 443 (#0)
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* SSLv3, TLS alert, Server hello (2):
* error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure
* Closing connection #0
curl: (35) error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure

Using -k / --insecure or adding insecure to my ~/.curlrc doesn't make any difference.

How do I ignore or force the certificate using curl command line?

When using wget seems to work fine. Also works when testing with openssl as below.

$ openssl s_client -connect thepiratebay.se:443
CONNECTED(00000003)
SSL handshake has read 2651 bytes and written 456 bytes
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES128-SHA
Server public key is 2048 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1
    Cipher    : AES128-SHA

I've got it

$ curl --version
curl 7.28.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0) libcurl/7.28.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8| zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.17
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtsp smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz

Best Answer

Some sites disable support for SSL 3.0 (possible because of many exploits/vulnerabilities), so it's possible to force specific SSL version by either -2/--sslv2 or -3/--sslv3. Also -L is worth a try if requested page has moved to a different location.

In my case it was a curl bug ( found in OpenSSL ), so curl needed to be upgraded to the latest version (>7.40) and it worked fine.