Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
Post History
I visited a site that I use infrequently and got a certificate error, specifically NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. I contacted the owner, who asked for a screenshot. That surprised me, as I had a...
#1: Initial revision
by
Monica Cellio
·
2023-12-11T03:09:38Z (5 months ago)
Are certificate errors always reported immediately, or is validation cached?
I visited a site that I use infrequently and got a certificate error, specifically `NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID`. I contacted the owner, who asked for a screenshot. That surprised me, as I had assumed that a certificate problem would be visible to everyone. I tested three browsers across two devices and saw the same problem everywhere -- but I also hadn't visited this site recently from any of them. The owner presumably visits it a lot. Is certificate validation cached client-side? If so, for how long, and how can a user flush or bypass it? I can think of two reasons to want to flush such a cache and force a recheck. One is if I'm the owner of the site and want to check that everything's ok (the situation that prompted this question). The other is if I'm a cautious user who wants to double-check that, say, my bank doesn't have security issues before I log in -- a scenario that hadn't occurred to me before seeing this error that a site owner doesn't see.