I can only imagine its prompting for the TLS certificate to use for authententicating you with your organisations forward proxy server to access the Internet. At startup the SAS Enterprise Guide client will connect to SAS servers to check for updates. I'd enable the SAS Enterprise Guide log and when the prompt appears check where you are up to in the log. Once you OK the dialog perhaps the messages that follow in the log will give you an idea where its coming from. ... View more

Suppose I could just answer this for the more common deployments out there. Since you mention the existing use of cURL I imagine this is Linux or some UNIX derivative. So for SAS 9.4 or later on UNIX/Linux you will be able to set the SSLREQCERT= System Option appropriately and it should be all good. Remember to set the option back after you are finished fetching the resource from the server with a self-signed certificate. This option is an invocation option. No TLS connections will be validated by the SAS session if you launch it so be careful with this.   For those using SAS 9.4 on Microsoft Windows the TLS communication is handled by using facilities provided in the operating system. Myself I don't know or use of Windows so I'd not be sure about what tunables are available in Windows to control how certificate validation is handled. Perhaps Windows has some way you can add exceptions into the Windows validation process for certain connections/process/users etc. Something to ask your Microsoft Windows admins about.     For any version of SAS 9.3 or older there is no way I can think to do this.   EDIT: warn about the option affecting all TLS communication if its set. ... View more