Getting self-signed SSL certificates to work on Firefox 3.5

Theres alot of discussion lately about Mozilla’s decision to annex self-signed certificates in Firefox 3.x; up until now Firefox would have grudgingly lived with self-signed certificates – when reaching a website that was self-signed all you had to do was click the ‘add exception’ link at the bottom of the warning message, but no more!

When you visit a website that secures itself with a self-signed SSL certificate your now more likely to recieve a much more ominous warning telling you that the certificate is invalid and no obvious way to allow you to proceed regardless.

Having recently setup a secure subversion repository I had this exact problem also. This morning I found a solution, its not ideal but it works perfectly. To make Firefox play nice you have to add your CA (certificate authority) certificate AND your server certificate to Firefox’s list of allowed authorities, then and only then do you get the option to add the server as an exception. Here’s how you do it:

You will need a local copy of the ca.crt and server.crt certificate files.

Open the certificates window

Firefox Preferences -> Advanced Tab -> Encryption -> View Certificates

Import your Certificate Authority file

Authorities Tab -> Click Import -> Browse to your ca.crt file

Import your Server Certificate file

Servers Tab -> Click Import -> Browse to your server.crt file

Thats it! Next time you visit your website (https://mywebsite.com/ for example) you should now be able to add an exception to allow the self-signed certificate.

Reaching the Firefox preferences window differs slightly from OS to OS. In Mac OS X its Firefox -> Preferences, in Linux its often Edit -> Preferences and in Windows its Tools -> Preferences. Its beyond me why Mozilla couldn’t keep it consistent, but there you go.

I hope this post helped you.

The Mozilla Phone

image care of mozphone.com

The Awesomer linked me onto this blog about (conceptual) open source phone development. It seems to be a blog dedicated to conceptuals of how an opensource/mozilla phone would look and operate, in association with Mozilla’s concept series.

The Mozilla Phone is an experiment in the open-source development of a conceptual phone. Put in motion by Aza Raskin of Mozilla Labs as part of its Concept Series, the project is led by Billy May as well as the combined insight of all those with an idea and a keyboard (and maybe a Wacom). While some of the problems will deal with industrial design, a great deal of the focus will be put on physical interface issues and basic user-phone interaction.

[The Open Web Phone] via [The Awesomer]