There are many reasons why a certificate may not be trusted. The
exact problem is indicated on the report card in bright red.
The problems fall into three categories:
Invalid certificate
Invalid configuration
Unknown Certificate Authority
1. Invalid certificate
A certificate is invalid if:
It is used before its activation date
It is used after its expiry date
Certificate hostnames don't match the site hostname
It has been revoked
It has insecure signature
It has been blacklisted
2. Invalid configuration
In some cases, the certificate chain does not
contain all the necessary certificates to connect the web
server certificate to one of the root certificates in our trust store.
Less commonly, one of the certificates in the chain (other than the
web server certificate) will have expired, and that invalidates the
entire chain.
3. Unknown Certificate Authority
In order for trust to be established, we must have the root certificate
of the signing Certificate Authority in our trust store. SSL Labs does not
maintain its own trust store; instead we use the store maintained by Mozilla.
If we mark a web site as not trusted, that means that the average web user's
browser will not trust it either. For certain special groups of users, such
web sites can still be secure. For example, if you can securely verify that
a self-signed web site is operated by a person you trust, then you can trust
that self-signed web site too. Or, if you work for an organisation that manages
its own trust, and you have their own root certificate already embedded in
your browser. Such special cases do not work for the general public, however,
and this is what we indicate on our report card.
4. Interoperability issues
In some rare cases trust cannot be established because of interoperability
issues between our code and the code or configuration running on the server.
We manually review such cases, but if you encounter such an issue please feel
free to contact us. Such problems are very difficult to troubleshoot and you
may be able to provide us with information that might help us determine the
root cause.
Please wait...
Certification Paths