On a particular website, in firefox, I click the lock in the address bar to see if the connection is secure. It is reported secure, see first image, it also says which CA verified the certificate. All seems well but if I click on more information, i get what is shown on the second image, firefox suddenly reports that the site is not encrypted. The website runs on IIS. This happens with both internal CA issued certificate (the ca is imported into firefox as trustworthy root) as well as with letsencrypt issued certificate. Neither internet explorer nor chrome find any anomalies and report the site as trustworthy and all certificates in order. Why is this happening and what kind of problem does this indicate? (i have another server at the same site running also IIS with exchange where the certificate shows correctly in firefox)
I have a digitalocean One-Click Ubuntu Wordpress Droplet with a NameCheap domain.
I've never done anything with SSL before so I followed a tutorial (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-ssl-certificate-on-apache-for-ubuntu-14-04). Once I made it to the end with no issues, I realized that it was a self-signed certificate and didn't remove the warning that browsers were giving and that I had to purchase one from a provider. Since my domain is through NameCheap, I went through them (Comodo?) and followed their linked tutorial for the setup (https://brettdewoody.com/how-to-setup-ssl-certs-with-digitalocean-and-comodo/).
I made it through that and browsers were bringing up an error saying that it was a self-signed certificate and it could be a problem. I went back through both tutorials and checked my stuff and tried to remove what I could of the original part. After blindly finagling things for a few hours, my site receives an A+ from this ssl checker (https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=vc2online.com) but browsers refuse to connect to the site (vc2online.com).
I don't even know where I need to start to get this to working properly.
Currently your issue is that you have 301 redirect from vc2online.com to www.vc2online.com but unfortunately your ssl certificate is only for vc2online.com, not www.vc2online.com.
You enabled HSTS so going backward won't be easy.
The quickest way to solve it is by using let's encrypt instead the comodo certificate.
You can use certbot to fully automate the process. You will find out it is much easier (and cheaper) than comodo paid certificate
P.S. I think this question should be asked in super user / server fault.
I've been getting reports of users visiting our site getting "this certificate is not trusted" errors when visiting our site via https. I don't seem to ever have any problems, but two separate people on my team have gotten this error randomly when they're on a different wifi network other than the one at our office. They don't have the same problem at the office.
I read up on intermediate certificates but this seems to be just a browser thing, not a network related issue.
I have an SSL cert from GoDaddy, it's on a Rails app running on nginx + unicorn.
Does anyone have any other ideas why this might happen? I'm pretty stumped.
Be sure that everyone is using the same host name.
I've seen this issue if there are multiple server aliases, for example www.foo.com and foo.com. be sure the one without the SSL certificate is redirecting traffic.
From home someone was using a different hostname, because of browser history. Fixing up the redirects fixed the problem.
The error should be tied to your browser not trusting the intermediate cert and not related to wifi. Please make sure the browser trusts the intermediate and root ca trust of GoDaddy.
Background:
I am updating an internal application to a two-step authentication process. I want to add a client certificate authentication process (via a smart card) on top of a traditional username/password form. The application is written in C#, hosted on IIS7, and targeting Chrome and IE8.
Problem:
I am having issues with getting the application to prompt the user for a client certificate. I have been debugging the application with the help of Fiddler. When I have a test client certificate saved in Fiddler's user's directory (C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\Fiddler2), the application works as expected. I am prompted for a PIN number protecting the smart card, and, when entered correctly, takes me to the login form. When I close Fiddler, the application throws a 403 Forbidden error instead (since Fiddler is no longer running and pointing to its certificate). What I haven't been able to figure out is why the application won't prompt for a certificate normally.
Current Server Setup:
Self Signed Certificate was created
443 Binding is pointing at Self Signed Certificate
Anonymous Authentication is Enabled
The Self Signed Certificate was added to both the Trusted Root CA and Intermediate CA (I read that another person had it in both rather than just the Trusted Root CA and that solved their issue, though neither set up has worked for us).
I cleared out the rest of the certificates in the Trusted Root CA that I didn't need (I read elsewhere that having too many certificates would cause SSL to choke).
I am out of ideas to try other than starting from scratch on another server. Does anyone know what the issue might be? This seems like it should be fairly straight forward and that I'm missing something minor. Any ideas are welcomed.
Update:
After spending more time with this issue today, I strongly believe it has to do with IIS7 not being configured correctly (I did not set up it originally). I think this because I enabled Failed Request Tracing, looked at the subsequent .xml files being generated, and saw that a 500 error was being thrown.
Chrome is throwing a "Access to the webpage was denied" message rather than a "403 - Forbidden: Access is denied". I don't know if this helps. I do know that when I do not make certificates required, the site will work as intended. Requiring a certificate is where it fails.
The Application Pool is set to .Net 4.0 | Classic | Network Service.
Your problem is that the browser doesn't either get the request to provide client certificate or there is a security related option to block it from happening. IE offers certificate only if the web site is in correct zone (intranet or trusted sites). Please check this before everything.
If that doesn't help then see this answer for next step. The netsh documentation says:
clientcertnegotiation
Optional. Specifies whether the negotiation of certificate is enabled or disabled. Default is disabled.
Enable that and even the dumbest browser should notice that it is supposed to offer certificate for authentication. To diagnose your problem further you can use WireShark to see the negotiation in action.
In every browser I've seen, the browser will not prompt you to select a certificate if it does not have any certificates signed by a CA the server trusts. So make sure your server is configured with the correct CAs. As Boklucius suggested, you can use openssl to examine the list of trusted CAs your server is sending to clients and see whether the CA you have signed your client certificates with is among them.
Try openssl s_client -connect yourip:443 -prexit
And see if the CA (your self signed cert) is send to the client in the Acceptable client certificate CA names.
you need to install openssl first if you don't have it
I'll throw in a "try restarting the browser" suggestion, particularly if you installed the certificate while the browser was running.
To add a rather painful lesson to the mix: Make sure you quit Skype (or any other application) that eats port 443.
So the idea here is if you are running a dev environment on the same machine (both client and IIS), and your team uses Skype or some other app to communicate.
Watch the hours go by as you try and debug this problem, seemingly doing everything "right", netsh http sslcerts and such, even rebooting but to no avail. Well, turns out Skype will eat 443 so turn it off and "poof" there goes your certificate prompt.
Then feel free to throw things at the wall, shout obscenities or just "Rage, rage against the dying of the light".
Also, make sure Fiddler isn't getting in the way. If you have it decrypting the SSL, it'll corrupt the message back to IE, and it doesn't have the certificate installed, so it can't offer it. Turn off fiddler, and voila, the certificate prompt appears.
In Firefox, if you press 'Cancel' the first time you're prompted for a certificate, and you left the sneaky 'Remember this decision' box checked, then Firefox will remember that and never offer it again.
You can view and delete your previous remembered decisions in Firefox Preferences -> Privacy & Security (about:preferences#privacy), View Certificates, and check the Authentication Decisions tab.
Just connecting to my VPN and trying showed me the certificate prompt. Needs to be done only the first time.
For some of my site visitors, the SSL certificate is failing. Whatever tests I do on various browsers for me the SSL certificate is valid.
I can't think of how to test this on client side, and to identify the problem.
How would you do this?
One client gets: fatal certificate unknown
While RouMao's answer is mostly correct, he has missed what is (IME) the most common problem with SSL certificates - the certificate you are using requires an interim certificate from the CA which you have not included in your certificate chain. Most CAs provide an online tool for analysing the certificate - try the one located here.
Also, is there any correlation with which browser being used? Notably, Chrome does not handle SSL v2 by default
Most of the failing of SSL certificates were caused by visitors themselves. Somehow could not tests or verified by server implementation.
Here are some obvious examples:
Your cert is validated since April 1st 2012, but the client's local machine time is set to 2010 -- one year later than current time. In this case, the visitor should encounter problem all the times, until his machine time is later than April 1st 2012.
visitor is behind a restricted firewall. The firewall could terminate the SSL/TLS connection and re-crypt the link with a pseudo/self-sign certificate. Indeed this could be considered as a man-in-middle attach.
The Trusted Root Certification was removed by client himself
it is very hard to fix all these problem. Sometimes, you need to create a client side native application to detect or fix all the possible problems, and require client browser to execute the application each time before it enter the HTTPS mode.
P.S. most of the e-bank application do like this.