Archived: Viewing Server Certificate in Chrome 40

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Archived: Viewing Server Certificate in Chrome 40

This section provides a tutorial example on how to view server certificate details when visiting an 'https' Website in Google Chrome 40.

When you visit an "https" Web server, it will send its certificate to your browser. Server's certificate is needed by the browser for 2 tasks listed below:

Your browser must validate the certificate to determine that the Website can be trusted or not before doing any further communications.
Your browser must use the public key in the certificate to help secure the communication messages sent and received.

Normally, your browser will do these 2 tasks automatically without your interaction. You don't need to know where is the server certificate and what's in the certificate.

But since I am interested to learn more about "https" communication, I want to see the server certificate. Here is what did on Google Chrome to see details of the server certificate.

1. Run Google Chrome and go to https://login.yahoo.com and wait for the log in page to be displayed.

2. Click the lock icon at the left side of the URL address area. The page security dialog box shows up.

3. Click the "Connection" tab. The connection security information is displayed.

4. Click the "Certificate information" link. The Certificate dialog box shows up. The General tab tells me this information:

This certificate is intended for the following purpose(s):
 - Ensure the identity of a remote computer
 - Proves your identify to a remote computer

Issued to: *.login.yahoo.com

Issued by: VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G3

Valid from 4/7/2014 to 4/9/2015