October 16, 2017

Chrome and Web Security

Filed under: Main — Tags: , — admin @ 12:01 am

Back in August, I wrote how I updated Wambooli to https, the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) URL. This move was done to avoid a warning that Google informed me would appear in the Chrome browser. Well, here it is in mid-October, just when Chrome is supposed to display the warning. So where it is?

On my computer, I’m running Chrome version 61.0.3163.100, which the program tells me is current as this post is written. I’ve seen no warning as they direly predicted would appear for “unsecure” websites starting in mid-October. Was I scammed?

No. The message was really sent from Google. I checked all the headers and secret info. It wasn’t faked – and why would it be? It costs extra to add an SSL certificate to any website, and why would the Bad Guys want a site to be more secure? That doesn’t make sense. The message was legit.

With the website secured with an SSL certificate, the padlock icon appears in the address bar. The site is prefixed with https not http. And if you type http, I added a redirect that loads the https version automatically.

Even with the changes, some pages appear as insecure. In Chrome you see the circle-I icon instead of the padlock icon in the address bar.

After some debugging and changing some references, the problem apparently is with some links to Amazon. On pages that offer my books for sale, the Amazon link is “insecure” in that it’s an http link on an https page. Such linking renders the entire page insecure. The problem is that I can’t seem to fix it because the link isn’t even on my page, it’s sent from Amazon. So I’ll look into addressing that issue when I have time.

Beyond that minor irk (and I did spend way too much time trying to track down the problem), I’ve not seen any other webpage flagged or appear with a pop-up alert about security. Some very popular sites on the web don’t have SSL certificates, so it will be interesting to see how this issue resolves.

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