Inspecting Certificates in Chrome

With a check-in on Monday night, Chrome Canary build 60.0.3088 regained a quick path to view certificates from the top-level security UI. When the new feature is enabled, you can just click the lock icon to the left of the address box, then click the “Valid” link in the new Certificate section of the Page Information bubble to see the certificate:

Chrome 60 Page Info dropdown showing certificate section

In some cases, you might only be interested in learning which Certificate Authority issued the site’s certificate. If the connection security is Valid, simply hover over the link to see the issuer information in a tooltip:

Tooltip shows Issuer CA

The new link is also available on the blocking error page in the event of an HTTPS error, although no tooltip is shown:

The link also available at the blocking Certificate Error page

Note: For now, you must manually enable the new Certificate section. Type chrome://flags/#show-cert-link in Chrome’s address box and hit enter. Click the Enable link and relaunch Chrome.

image

This section is enabled by default in Chrome 63 along with some other work to simplify the Page Information bubble.

If you want more information about the HTTPS connection, or to see the certificates of the resources used in the page, hit F12 to open the Developer Tools and click to the Security tab:

Chrome DevTools Security tab shows more information

You can learn more about Chrome’s certificate UIs and philosophy in this post from Chrome Security’s Chris Palmer.

-Eric Lawrence

Published by ericlaw

Impatient optimist. Dad. Author/speaker. Created Fiddler & SlickRun. PM @ Microsoft 2001-2012, and 2018-, working on Office, IE, and Edge. Now a GPM for Microsoft Defender. My words are my own, I do not speak for any other entity.

9 thoughts on “Inspecting Certificates in Chrome

  1. That’s a really nice change! I wasn’t personally bothered by the lack of cert info in the bubble too much, as I use it rarely enough to just ‘F12 into it’, but it’s a definite improvement.
    I’m a little bit concerned about your remark that the bubble may be simplified again, though. I remember last time this happened, it was suddenly a real pain (i.e. unnecessary extra clicks) to change site settings that hadn’t been previously set. Please, please be careful – the way it appears to work after this one change looks perfect.

      1. Sorry, I should have been clearer, the flag chrome://flags/#show-cert-link is not present in Chrome 59. But that makes sense because this is for Chrome 60 correct?

      2. Ok thanks, I was confused because I was using canary and forgot when moving to a different machine without 60.

        TLDR; I’m an Idiot.

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