A problem occurred somewhere in the SSL/TLS handshake

Curl doesn't have built-in root certificates (like most modern browser do). You need to explicitly point it to a cacert.pem file:

  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, '/path/to/cert/file/cacert.pem');

Without this, curl cannot verify the certificate sent back via ssl. This same root certificate file can be used every time you use SSL in curl.

You can get the cacert.pem file here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html

How about this. It fetches what might be the HTTPS Google homepage. (Since I've disabled certificate verification, I have no way to actually know that it's the real Google homepage.) It should do the trick for you.

<?PHP

// connect via SSL, but don't check cert
$handle=curl_init('https://www.google.com');
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$content = curl_exec($handle);

echo $content; // show target page
?>

Find if your OS includes a directory of certificates. If so then the required CA certs will often already be included. On Ubuntu, for example, it's usually /etc/ssl/certs. If this directory exists, set the CA path parameter:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAPATH, '/etc/ssl/certs');

Alternatively you can reference a single CA certificate file. Include a cacert.pem file in your project or install it on your server. Download from a trusted source, e.g. cacert.org. For a single file do not set the CAPATH and instead only set CAINFO:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, '/path/to/cacert.pem');

Turning off peer and host verification is a quick but insecure workaround to the real problem. These features exist for good reason: so you can trust, via 3rd party, that the system you're connecting to is the one you expect.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);