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May 31, 2010

Why do we get a “SSL Error – Certificate Not Trusted” ?

Filed under: Technical Articles — admin @ 1:00 am

Have you ever wondered while you  access a website through a secure connection , you happen to get a  warning  message that the certificate is not issued by a trusted authority.

In most cases , the  exact warning message  that you will get depends on your browser as follows:

I E –  The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority.!

Firefox – The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

Chrome – The site’s security certificate is not trusted!

Safari – Authentication failed because the server certificate is not trusted.!

If you get any one of the above warnings, this means that your browser does not trust the SSL certificate. This is because it is not signed by a company that the browser recognizes as a trusted one.

Here in this case the above two most common reasons for this warning are as shown below:

a – The website will be using a private SSL certificate, but it is missing a CA (Certificate Authority) certificate.

The solution in this case will be to purchase a private SSL Certificate which is issued for the specific domain or website by a trusted authority.

b – The website will be using a “self-signed” or a “free SSL Certificate”.

The solution here, will be to get the SSL certificate reinstalled with the correct CA bundle. The CA bundle is actually provided by the SSL vendor and should be included in the private SSL package.

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