I just installed an SSL on Plesk, and when I go to https://www.example.com in Chrome, I get the error below:
This CA Root Certificate is not trusted. To enable trust, install this certificate in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities Store.
Sort of defeats the purpose of having an SSL. Any idea how I can make this message go away?
I bought the SSL from GoDaddy, which I would expect to be a trusted authority.
This issue occurs because the issuing authority has signed the server certificate using an intermediate certificate that is not present in the certificate base of well-known trusted certificate authorities which is distributed with a particular browser. In this case the authority (GoDaddy) provides a bundle of chained certificates that should be chained with the server certificate to address this issue of lack of trust. Unfortunately, GoDaddy does not provide any documentation on this front. You should have received two different certificates from GoDaddy, one for your server, and the bundle. Depending on your server, this is what the configuration would look like:
For Apache:
Specify each certificate in its own directive:
SSLCertificateFile /path/to/cert/www.example.com.crt
SSLCertificateChainFile /path/to/cert/bundle.crt
For Nginx, documented here:
Both certificates should be concatenated, first the server, then the bundle:
cat www.example.com.crt bundle.crt > www.example.com.chained.crt
And then use www.example.com.chained.crt in your server ssl_certificate directive:
ssl_certificate www.example.com.chained.crt
GoDaddy is recognized on Windows operating systems, because the GoDaddy root certificate is pre-installed on Windows. But GoDaddy will not be automatically recognized in many contexts and would need to be manually configured by users (which is not a trivial task). IPhone, for example, will not trust GoDaddy certificates out of the box. You may consider getting certificate from established certificate authorities such as Verisgn or Thawte, but they will be more expensive.
#John: GoDaddy is a registrar/webhost, I believe their certificates are just reseller certs. You don't need to go expensive to get compatibility as #Jaro suggests. I've deployed several RapidSSL certificates that are recognized by Chrome/iOS and Safari/iOS without user intervention and are much cheaper than the higher-insurance certificates like Symantec/VeriSign.
The only way to make that message go away, is by buying a real certificate from a trusted authority.
Related
I have the company CA signed certificate, intermediate and server certificate in the identity store ( .jks) but still the browser says , cannot be verified by a trusted authority error. Using weblogic -10.3.1 from the weblogic logs i also notice this -
Invalid/unknown SSL header was received from peer x.y.z.12 during SSL handshake
But when I install the root and intermediate certificates into certmgr.msc then when i access the url again in a new window it has no error on the browser and also no error log in the weblogic server.
What could be wrong ?
Global CA's have their root and intermediates recognised by all the modern browsers. However when browser encounter s a certificate whose intermediate and roots aka chain certificates & ca certificates are not a part of its trust store so it fails to chain the leaf certificate to its issuer. So in order to mitigate thi, the roots and intermediates of the company ca must be added so that the browser can verify the complete chain.
Agreed .but thats how the trust works. The company issues ca certificate is known only to your organization but browsers are accessed globally and if you want make the certificate trusted in all the browsers then either you switch to public ca issued certificates or get your root certificate cross signed by a global ca root.
I have a web page with apache, and it is hosted only in localhost, but all devices that are connected to my network can be entered using my ipv4 (192.168.1.x), I have installed a certificate using openssl, but the certificate is only valid For my pc where I am hosting the site, if I try to enter with another device it tells me that it is not valid.
That's expected since the Certificate Authority (who emitted your certificate) is not trusted by the browsers. You'd need to install your CA certificate in your clients in order to make them trust the certificates emitted by that CA.
If you own a valid domain, you may buy a certificate for it from a trusted CA, or even emit a certificate using Let's Encrypt, which emits free SSL certificates that are trusted by all major browsers currently. Remember that this won't work neither for invalid/local domains or domains that you don't own.
I have installed a ssl certificate via WHM on one of my domain. Site is working with https://xyz.com.
However it is not working with https://www.xyz.com. I have checked the certificate and it is for www version as well. After some research it appears to be incomplete chain issue. I had no idea how to resolve this. Please help.
A certificate can contain a special Authority Information Access extension (RFC-3280) with URL to issuer's certificate. Most browsers can use the AIA extension to download missing intermediate certificate to complete the certificate chain. But some clients (mobile browsers, OpenSSL) don't support this extension, so they report such certificate as untrusted.
You can solve the incomplete certificate chain issue manually by concatenating all certificates from the certificate to the trusted root certificate (exclusive, in this order), to prevent such issues. Note, the trusted root certificate should not be there, as it is already included in the system’s root certificate store.
You should be able to fetch intermediate certificates from the issuer and concat them together by yourself. I have written a script to automate the procedure, it loops over the AIA extension to produce output of correctly chained certificates. https://github.com/zakjan/cert-chain-resolver
I guess it can't be done, but if so, I'd like to know why.
Let's say I get an SSL certificate for example.com from one of the official certificate authorities around. Let's also say I'm running a.example.com and b.c.d.example.com and would like to have SSL certificates for those as well.
Can I use the example.com certificate to issue certificates for a.example.com and b.c.d.example.com myself? And will they be recognized by users' browsers? If not, why not?
(My guess that it can't be done is because it would break the very lucrative wildcard cert business model, wouldn't it?)
Clarification: can't I act as a "self-signed" certificate authority using the keypair for which I obtained the official cert, and simply add my official cert in the validation chain?
You cannot use Your certificate to issue other certificates, because the purposes of the
certificate are encoded in Your certificate and "Certificate Authority" is certainly not included in that list.
Web browsers check the "certificate chain" beginning from Your certificate, the certificate that was used to sign it, the signer of that certificate etc.
Your certificate must match the current use case (mostly "identify web site") and all signing certificates must include the "Certificate Authority" flag. The last certificate must be known to the browser (root cert).
As You already guess, wildcard certificates might help in Your case.
You're correct, you cannot issue certificates from a certificate. You need a Certificate Authority to issue certificates.
The whole point of a Certificate Authority is that they are a trusted 3rd party. CA's like Verisign are trusted by default by most browsers so that you dont have to manually accept certificates from them. They have what is termed a trusted root certificate.
If you create your own Certificate Authority and start dishing out certificates, web browsers will not know you and hance not trust you. The user will be prompted.
When generating a self-signed certificate using keytool, can I use an IP address for the Common Name?
Once I generated the certificate, I exported it so I can install it in my clients/browsers. In Windows, I ran mmc.exe and added it as a Trusted Root Certificate Authority.
However, when I navigate to the IP address in my browser, it is still an untrusted connection. I ensured Tomcat had all the correct Connector settings.
Am I doing this correctly? do I need to be my own CA? How can I use SSL for development purposes? I'm still trying to understand SSL completely.
First question: if you'll be connecting by IP, then yes.
Second question: No, you don't install your self-signed certificate as CA, you just add exception when your browser warns you that it's self-signed.
You can set up CA — you generate root certificate first, install it in the client, and then generate CSR and then server certificate from it (see e.g. this), but for development purposes this is a complete waste of time.