thank you for the fast reply. I'm using scgi, so my setup looks like this:
location / { include /etc/nginx/scgi_params; scgi_pass 127.0.0.1:4000; } to solve the problem I created a file "scgi_ssl_params" with following content: scgi_param SSL_PROTOCOL $ssl_protocol; scgi_param HTTPS on; scgi_param SSL_CIPHER $ssl_cipher; scgi_param SSL_CLIENT_SERIAL $ssl_client_serial; scgi_param SSL_CLIENT_S_DN $ssl_client_s_dn; scgi_param SSL_CLIENT_I_DN $ssl_client_i_dn; scgi_param SSL_SESSION_ID $ssl_session_id; scgi_param SSL_CLIENT_CERT $ssl_client_cert; scgi_param SSL_CLIENT_RAW_CERT $ssl_client_raw_cert; scgi_param SSL_CLIENT_VERIFY $ssl_client_verify; and modified my setup to: location / { include /etc/nginx/scgi_params; include /etc/nginx/scgi_ssl_params; scgi_pass 127.0.0.1:4000; }