443120 - View Certificate UI says invalid for "unknown reasons" when reason known elsewhere

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 453075

(Core Graveyard :: Security: UI, defect)

Description

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: 

The certificate of the given site is invalid. Larry's tell us: "The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted.".

When viewing the certificate, we get in the UI, the following reason: "Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons."

Both are incoherent, and the second not really helpful.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to https://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/libero/WebOpac.cls
2.(Note the error message)
3. Click "Or you can add an exception..."
4. Click "Add exception..."
5. Click "Get certificate"
6. Click "View..."
Actual Results:  
Given reason: "Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons."

Expected Results:  
Given reason: "The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted."

Note that there is no easy way to understand quickly why the issuer certificate is not trusted.

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

In the SSL error page I do get "The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted" which is accurate although it could be clearer if it avoided duplicating trusted and certificate. Maybe something more like "The certificate is issued by an unknown [untrusted?] authority"

The exception dialog says "Certificate is not trusted, because if has not been verified by a recognized authority". Not sure why that's a different string, but other than the comma it's OK, too, and clearer to the layperson than the string on the error page. I would have preferred "issued by" rather than verified by, I think -- isn't it Firefox doing the verifying?

The bad string ("unknown reasons") only show up on the detailed "View" dialog. I can confirm that as pretty silly when we obviously knew the reason immediately prior to opening the dialog.

Comment 2

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

This is a dupe of bug 453075; before bug 149834, the "View" panel did have a detailed error.  Duping forward because bug 453075 has more info.