Unable to connect to a website over HTTPS using cURL: curl: (35) SSL connect error

Symptoms

• It is not possible to connect to a website over secure connection via cURL with the following error message:

  # curl -v https://example.com
  *   About to connect() to example.com port 443 (#0)
  * Trying 203.0.113.2... connected
  * Connected to example.com (203.0.113.2) port 443 (#0)
  * Initializing NSS with certpath: sql:/etc/pki/nssdb
  *   CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
    CApath: none
  * NSS error -12286
  * Error in TLS handshake, trying SSLv3...
  
  GET / HTTP/1.1
  User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.13.6.0 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2
  Host: example.com
  Accept: */*
  
  Connection died, retrying a fresh connect
  Closing connection #0
  Issue another request to this URL: 'https://example.com'
  About to connect() to example.com port 443 (#0)
  Trying 203.0.113.2... connected
  Connected to example.com (203.0.113.2) port 443 (#0)
  TLS disabled due to previous handshake failure
  CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
  CApath: none
  NSS error -12286
  Closing connection #0
  SSL connect error curl: (35) SSL connect error

• cURL package version is lower than curl-7.19.7-43.el6:

  # rpm -qa | grep curl
  curl-7.19.7-35.el6.x86_64

Cause

Outdated version of the cURL package.

Resolution

Update the cURL package to the latest version:

# yum update