Firefox3

Firefox 3 and Certificates

Read this if you are experiencing trouble accessing our software pages with Firefox 3

Problem Description

Users of the recently released Mozilla Firefox version 3 can experience problems when trying to access encrypted web-sites such as our software pages. When accessing the encrypted page for the first time, Firefox 3 could show an alert message "www.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de:443 uses an invalid security certificate".

The reason for this is that we are using a certificate that is not issued by a Certification Authority (CA) included into Mozilla products. Certificates are used to identify and authenticate the server of a secure web-site. Instead of purchasing such a certificate from a commercial CA included into Mozilla products, we use a certificate signed by the CeBiTec. User who have just upgraded from Firefox 2 and used our software before will most likely not be affected.

Due to reasons of cost efficiency we do not intend to purchase a certificate from a commercial vendor for our servers. However, Firefox 3 is much more restrictive when it comes to unrecognized CAs and thus more complicated to configre for this than Firefox 2. We intend to obtain a certificate from the CA of the Deutsche Forschungs-Netz (DFN). Unfortunately, this CA (or better German Telekom which is the root CA for DFN) is, up to now, not included into Mozilla. See the Mozilla bug report https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378882 to get an impressive overview of the bureaucratic process of getting a root certificate into this product.

Solution

To access our software you may want to follow the procedure outlined below. This has to be done only once. We apologize for any complication caused by this.

• In the alert box, click OK

• Click Or you can add an exception...

• Click Add Exception

• In the following dialogue click Get Certificate

• After the certificate has loaded, check the Permanently store exception checkbox. Otherwise, the procedure has to be repeated after each browser start.
• Click Confirm Security Exception
• The software page should appear, this has only to be done once for all cebitec pages