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why does the hella.cheap site have an SSL cert with an unknown authority?



It has a COMODO certificate. If you see otherwise you might be getting MITMd.


It has a valid Comodo certificate but forgot to include the full certificate chain, which is probably now the #1 configuration error (I help do support for Let's Encrypt and about 80% of "my cert doesn't work after issuance" problems are that). These bugs are tricky because most browsers cache intermediate certs and then forgive sites that don't send intermediates that the browser knows about, so you can see an error in one browser or device and not another because of different cert caches!


I just ran into this today... A site I manage with a Comodo certificate was showing unknown issuer in Firefox and only Firefox, and I've never had it fail before (and we've never had any user reports). Added in the cert chain, error is gone. Dunno if the other browsers had Comodo as trusted or it's common enough that everyone who regularly uses Firefox (I haven't used it in months) has it cached...


Wouldn't it be more reasonable for browsers to not cache them at all and universally reject missing intermediate certificates? (IIRC correctly, Chrome doesn't mind but Firefox will give you the train conductor)


It would definitely eventually reduce the frequency of this configuration mistake.

Firefox definitely does cache intermediates (I've seen it do so as recently as today).




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