Server Certificate General Information

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Server Certificate General Information

This section provides a tutorial example on how to view general information of a server certificate in Mozilla Firefox.

The certificate viewer looks very differently in the newer versions. For example Firefox 116 displays the server certificate and its signing certificates in an "about:" page. It has multiple tabs to display multiple certificates. The HTTPS server certificate is displayed in the first tab and the root CA certificate in the last tab, as shown below.

Server Certificate Viewer in Mozilla Firefox 116

On the certificate viewer, you can easily find general information about the HTTPS server certificate. Here is an example of the Yahoo.com HTTPS server certificate:

   Subject Name
        Country   US
 State/Province   New York
       Locality   New York
   Organization   Yahoo Holding Inc.
    Common Name   *.fantasysports.yahoo.com 

    Issuer Name
        Country   US
   Organization   DigiCert Inc
    Common Name   DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA 

       Validity
     Not Before   Thu, 30 May, 2024
      Not After   Wed, 17 Jul 2024 

Subject Alt Names
       DNS Name   *.fantasysports.yahoo.com
       DNS Name   ymail.com 
       DNS Name   s.yimg.com 
       DNS Name   *.yahoo.com 
       ...

As you can see, this certificate identifies many Yahoo Websites listed in the "Subject Alt Names" section.

If you are using an older version, Firefox uses a dialog box to display the HTTPS server certificate with two tabs: "General" and "Details", as shown below: