The subversion authentication module accepts any file as certificate and anything as password. A failure always results in the same not helpful exception "SSL handshake failed: 'Received fatal alert: handshake_failure'" after the subversion client send a empty client certificate send to the server on the TLS connection. I am not sure if is allowed to send a empty client certificate message to the server.

Due the complexity of the software chain and configuration parameters used for HTTPS authentication, it is very annoying to find the real problem if no component returns a usable error message.

The expected behavior is to validate the input parameters and do not try to establish a connection with obvious invalid parameters.