OpenSSL identify reason for "bad certificate"

Question

I'm using pyOpenSSL which is a wrapper for OpenSSL. I had a client program trying to connect to my server and repeatedly was getting sslv3 alert bad certificate on the server. It wasn't until I realized it was due to the client's clock being improperly set that I was able to figure out the issue. I'm guessing that the client saw the server's certs as being dated in the "future" and somehow that resulted in a sslv3 alert bad certificate on the server.

Is there any way to get better descriptions as to why a particular cert failed? I'm assuming is this case the verification failed on the client side due to the clock not being set right, but the error on the server side is the same as if a bad certificate was sent and the verification failed on the server side.

Solution

Unfortunately the problem descriptions are fairly limited. Errors are transmitted with TLS alerts. Each alert is only a number without any additional information and there are only few alerts defined, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Alert_protocol. For example there is an alert for an expired certificate, but no alert for a certificate which is not yet valid which would be necessary in your case. So all the client could send back is that the certificate is bad.