I am developing an application against a remote https web service. While developing I need to proxy requests from my local development server (running nginx on ubuntu) to the remote https web server. Here is the relevant nginx config: server { server_name project.dev; listen 443; ssl on; ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/server.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/server.key; location / { proxy_pass https://remote.server.com; proxy_set_header Host remote.server.com; proxy_redirect off; } } The problem is that the remote HTTPS server can only accept connections over SSLv3 as can be seen from the following openssl calls. Not working: $ openssl s_client -connect remote.server.com:443 CONNECTED(00000003) 139849073899168:error:140790E5:SSL routines:SSL23_WRITE:ssl handshake failure:s23_lib.c:177: --- no peer certificate available --- No client certificate CA names sent --- SSL handshake has read 0 bytes and written 226 bytes --- New, (NONE), Cipher is (NONE) Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported Compression: NONE Expansion: NONE --- Working: $ openssl s_client -connect remote.server.com:443 -ssl3 CONNECTED(00000003) <snip> --- SSL handshake has read 1562 bytes and written 359 bytes --- New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is RC4-SHA Server public key is 1024 bit Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported Compression: NONE Expansion: NONE SSL-Session: Protocol : SSLv3 Cipher : RC4-SHA <snip> With the current setup my nginx proxy gives a 502 Bad Gateway when I connect to it in a browser. Enabling debug in the error log I can see the message: [info] 1451#0: *16 peer closed connection in SSL handshake while SSL handshaking to upstream. I tried adding ssl_protocols SSLv3; to the nginx configuration but that didn't help. Does anyone know how I can set this up to work correctly?