When SSL Certificates Go Wild

You’ve set up your website and secured it with an SSL certificate that you bought through your ISP. Everything works fine and the chain of trust is just fine in your browser, but when you try accessing your secured site using a command line tool, the connection fails. Why? There’s a good chance that you are not sending your intermediate certificate(s) along with the server certificate.
PKI Trust Review
As a quick reminder, the whole point of SSL certificates and the Public Key Infrastructure is to prove that the site you connected to is the one it says it is. How do we know? The server sends you a certificate with its name in it, digitally signed by an Issuer. If you choose to trust that Issuer’s honesty and believe that they made sure they issued to the right site, you implicitly trust that the end site is the right one; it’s a “Chain of Trust.”
In reality, we don’t typically trust many Issuers. Look in the Trusted Root certificates for your browser, or on a Mac, open Keychain Access and look in System Roots, and you’ll see that for Yosemite in this case, globally – to establish SSL Continue reading
