I am running a twiki installation on a Centos9 server that is accessible from our own network via http://twiki.
It is not accessible from outside.
I regularly get the warning SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER (Firefox) or NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID (Internet Explorer, Edge). Of course I can ignore the warning, but after a while it pops up again and that's quite annoying for me.
What can I do to prevent this? I don't actually need https, http would suffice, but I always get redirected to the https version. Is this something the browser does? Or can I configure the web server (Apache) to prevent this?
To be honest, I'm not really a webmaster or network expert. I just need to get the Twiki working. What I've found out so far is that I'm getting the warning because I self-signed my SSL certificate and there is no known trusted author. I also can't get a signed SSL certificate because my server doesn't have a domain like .com or something.
If possible, I would prefer a solution on the server so that each user doesn't have to configure their browser
Related
When accessing https://mcgillcrm.com some users are seeing this in chrome: ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL and this is firefox: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
But it only happens when they access the site through a specific ISP (Videotron).
When the site is accessed via a hotspot or when connected to a different ISP it works fine and it also works if the user is using Windows machine instead of a Mac.
I verified SSL labs, checked port 443 and compared against another site where it doesn't throw this error and everything seems fine.
We have a 301 redirect towards https and I double checked that users really type https:// when accessing the web-site, but it still doesn't work.
How is the connection done to the ISP vs. how is the connection done to a different ISP or mobile network
Mac user connects to the wireless modem: SSL errors come up
Mac user connects to the wireless mobile hotspot: No error comes up
Update 12 Oct 2022
We re-installed a new certificate from scratch and this one is not showing 'self signed' anywhere. Will see if it helps.
HTTPS is end to end encryption and integrity protection. It should not depend on the ISP used by the client. If it is specific only to the ISP or specific clients then something is messed up at their end, like some middleboxes or antivirus interfering with the connection, a captive portal asking the client to acknowledge some rules first, DNS resolution pointing to a different IP then yours etc. There is nothing you can do from the server end against this, since maybe the server is not even reached by the client.
Problem turned out to be with safebrowse.io which was somehow caching the incorrect certificate (clearing SSL cert in chrome didn't help).
It in turn affected other browsers also like Firefox. So once the incorrect cert was cached it flagged it globally as an unsafe site..
It looks like it was cached inside the logged in users chrome profile (Google Workspace account).
Solution was to login as Guest > Go to web-site > Click 'Proceed anyway' > Restart Chrome
This looks like a serious design flaw with safebrowse.io, why/how it caches SSL certificates in Chrome profile is unclear. This should have worked while accessing the web-site in Chrome incognito but it didn't..
Problem: Since Chrome updated a while back (version 58?), I'm not able to access my computer's development Express web server with HTTPS from a remote machine on the same private LAN.
I have created a self-signed certificate on the server (my laptop), and it works great from the same machine via https://localhost:8383 (the local SSL port).
In the past I could bypass the warning on a remote machine on the same network but it has stopped working.
I've gone through the steps of creating a local secure DNS server on my own router with DD-WRT, and self-signed a new certificate with SAN so I could use a DNS host name to access it without specifying an IP address.
I'm able to get to the page after bypassing the message that warns the site's SSL certificate could not be verified. But that's not good enough because while the site will load, the underlying websocket service I'm using on the same port does not work, and so the application loads but is broken on the remote machine. Still works on the local machine because the certificate is valid.
It seems the issue centers around Websockets within Express.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated! This is a strictly secure environment that's meant to be used on a private network and it makes no sense for me to spend a bunch of money on a public certificate if that even matters.
Thank you.
It appears that the issue is with mobile Chrome and Safari on IOS -- I can get untrusted SSL certificates to work with websockets from another computer on the same network with the latest versions of Chrome and Safari. But on IOS (ipads and iphones), the page will load after being prompted, but Websockets FAIL to function whatsoever.
I've found a couple other people finding this issue.
My workaround for this problem was to revert away from SSL for my private network and completely avoid self-signed certificates.
In a private environment this is OK.
I'm trying to upgrade a websocket connection ws:// to wss:// using a nginx reverse proxy https://github.com/nicokaiser/nginx-websocket-proxy/blob/master/simple-wss.conf
but I seem to be having trouble with the certificate part. My server is located on the same network as the client. So Ideally I would want my users to log in to "https://example.com" and then the client makes a connection to "wss://192.168.1.xxx:xxxx".
As of now the browsers are blocking it because of NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID. I don't really know to produce a self signed certificate that the browsers will trust on the local network. Googling only gives me answers on how to do it if my server would be accessed using a domain name but I will always connect to a local network IP. Help is appreciated!
To anyone coming across this I managed to solve it using this post outlining the architecture https://support.plex.tv/articles/206225077-how-to-use-secure-server-connections/
What ended up happening was that we set up a url pointing to a server running nginx which parsed the subdomain and redirected the connection to that url. For example: wss://192-168-1-142.mydomain.com redirects to ws://192.168.1.142 which makes the browser trust the connection
Does this work?
Your post is a year old now and browsers have become stricter since then. Usually, a browser will produce 'mixed content' errors if you access HTTP content from a HTTPS page, and the only way to get round this is to change the site settings to allow insecure content, which is scary for users in the face of a big warning message.
If accessing an HTTPS web address redirects to an HTTP local IP address, won't the browser still complain about mixed content?
I have a similar situation to you. I am writing a Progressive Web Application (PWA) to control network music players on a home network. The players only support HTTP but a PWA requires HTTPS for services workers to work and to allow the app to be 'installed'.
My solution is to run a local server on the home network which can talk to the players over HTTP. Then I can access this server over HTTPS from my browser so that the browser itself is not making any HTTP calls.
This works fine if the server is on localhost because localhost is a special case where security rules are relaxed. But if the server is on another machine, how can I create an SSL certificate since (1) it seems that local IP addresses are not allowed in the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) section of the certificate, and (2) I won't know in advance what the IP address of the server will be.
If your workaround works, then the local server can use HTTP instead so I won't need a certificate. The local server can register itself with a web server, and then the browser can connect over HTTPS to the web server, which would redirect to the IP address of the local server over HTTP.
But does this trick work?
I recently bought the SSL certification off GoDaddy in India for my domain anrweb.com
The only problem is that the https:// version throws up an "SSL connection error" on Chrome & Firefox. I had incorporated a web.config file that redirects all http requests to https, but that caused the website to not load at all!!
I'm weak in these server-side setups and was looking for help online but was unable to find any resources. Godaddy has no clue whats happening either.
Can someone tell me if I need to make any other changes to my DNS records or any other back-end updates to reflect the SSL installation.
BTW, my domain services, hosting & SSL are all from GoDaddy
What version of Firefox and Chrome are you using? I'm able to access the site on Chrome 40.0.2214.91. The SSL Labs test https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=anrweb.com does not indicate any handshake errors although your choice and ordering of cipher suites could use some cleanup. https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Strong_SSL_Security_On_Apache2.html has the recommended SSLCipherSuite value.
Solved.. Turns out I had to point my DNS to the newly issued static, permanent IP address. Works just fine now.
GoDaddy should've mentioned this during the setup, but figured it out anyway.
Thanks a ton
I have SSL working fine in production but have some issues locally.
When I run the site it opens 2 tabs, one http:// and one https://
I want to just use the http:// tab locally for testing. When I go to a page that requires https I get the error:
Unable to make a secure connection to the server. This may be a
problem with the server or it may be requiring a client authentication
certificate that you don't have
I have added the certificate to:
Persona/Certificates
Trusted Root Certification Authorities/Certificates
Intermediate Certification Authorities/Certificates
Everything works fine locally when I use the https:// tab.
Do I need to add the certificate somewhere else too?
Using SSL certs locally is always a challenge. When the website opens, it's likely using the loopback IP (127.0.0.1) which will always (rare exceptions, perhaps, that I can't think of) give a certificate error, because the cert is bound to a domain name, not an IP. Ideally you'd probably want to not use your websites real SSL cert locally anyway for security reasons.
You can use a self signed cert for localhost, which should work:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/32bc5a61-1f7b-4545-a514-a11652f11200
Also, I just blogged a code snippet we've used before -- in short, it just avoids using SSL for local connections and otherwise lets you define which pages/folders should otherwise be SSL protected...
http://www.structuretoobig.com/post/2013/02/19/Skipping-SSL-Connections-Locally.aspx