435544 - Unknown Security Certificate Failure -- reason -- "unknown"

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Security, defect)

Description

[L A Walsh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14

In trying to send an "email" [sic] to the usps.com website, I was taken to a webform at the above URL.  Not only was the site unrecognized, but the cert was Invalid.  The problem is that I am unable to ascertain *why* the certificate is invalid -- or more specifically, Firefox doesn't know why it can't accept the certificate -- Firefox is simply rejecting the cert for unknown reasons.  This is worrisome to say the least.  Are all of my certs bad is there a corruption in them that's enabling "bad things"...Don't know...
Under  the "General" tab, the error says (and I can't Copy/Paste it, because that's also broken on this tab).  
     "Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons."
Say what?  Uh...It sais it was issued by Verisign -- and it is for the website I appear to be connecting to (hdusps.esecurecare.net), and it it's valid from dec-2007 to dec-2009, so...I have no clue...(and obviously neither does Firefox).  But I'm certainly not going to accept it -- since I've no clue what is wrong with it.
Since I can't save the cert to disk, unless I want to select each of the 20 fields and copy the name and data, separately -- and paste it somewhere -- that would be "40" cut&paste operations to include the cert in an error report, email or to save it in a file.  Not an option for someone with repetitive stress sensitivities.  :-/


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  It happened multiple times upon visiting the above URL.  coming from 
2. the "Email Us"  link on the USPS website at URL:
3. http://faq.usps.com/eCustomer/iq/usps/request.do?create=kb:USPSFAQ
Actual Results:  
Unknown certificate failure

Expected Results:  
no failure

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

It works for me, using both Firefox 2.0.0.14 and Firefox 3.0 RC 1. Firefox 2 didn't recognizize it immediately, but wanted to accept it temporarily. Firefox 3 accwepted it immediately, no questions asked.

Maybe a temporary error.

Comment 2

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

works for me, too. And we've gotten other recent complaints about hdusps.esecurecare.net so I think they just had a glitch on their end that they've fixed.

There are already bugs about the unhelpful "unknown" error, and about the fact that you can select text from the cert viewer dialog.