Viewing Server Certificate in Google Chrome

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Viewing Server Certificate in Google Chrome

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

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://www.yahoo.com. Wait for the home page to be fully loaded.

2. Click the site information icon at the left side of the URL address area. I see the site information popup box.

3. Click "Connection is secure". The site security popup box shows up. It looks differently on different Chrome releases:

HTTPS Site Security Information - Google Chrome

4. Click the "Certificate is valid" link on the popup box. I see the server certificate displayed in the Certificate Viewer window. It also looks differently on different Chrome releases:

HTTPS Server Certificate Viewer - Google Chrome

In the detail section of the Certificate Viewer, I can see a list of properties associated with the server certificate. For example: the server certificate of the Yahoo Website contains the following properties:

            Version   3
      Serial Number   02 B3 39 59 ... 

Issued To 
   Common Name (CN)   *.fantasysports.yahoo.com 
   Organization (O)   Yahoo Holding Inc.

Issued By
   Common Name (CN)   DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA 
   Organization (O)   DigiCert Inc

Validity Period
          Insued On   Tuesday, April 2, 2024 at ...
         Expires On   Thursday, May 23, 2024 at ...

SHA-256 Fingerprints 
        Certificate   fbc7627e...
         Public Key   1b3ccbae...