Description

This article provides the information related to the error "NET::ERR_CERT_INVALID - Your connection is not private" which you see on the google chrome while accessing J-web.

Symptoms

Below page you will receive, while accessing the J-web on chrome.

Solution

To access the J-Web interface for all SRX Series Firewalls, your management device requires the following software:

  • Supported browsers—Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Note: By default, you establish a J-Web session through an HTTPS-enabled Web browser.Microsoft ended Internet Explorer support in June 2022. Therefore, starting with Junos OS Release 22.4R1 or later, J-Web UI is not supported in Internet Explorer.

This could be because of many reasons. Some of the common ones are

  • Certificate expired - Generally all SSL certificates have an expiry date even if you have purchased them from known CAs. In most paid systems, they auto-renew while in free services, you may need to manually renew them. Until then your visitors will receive a warning that your site is not secure.
  • Insecure links - Even if you have a properly working certificate for your site, some links on the page(images etc.) may not be using the https:// scheme which in turn will make your site insecure.
  • Unknown Certificate Authority - Certificate Authorities are known(known to the browser) organisations which have already setup their network. Browsers ship with information about these known authorities by default. Its possible that your browser may not have information about the specific CA which issued the certificate for the page you are visiting.
  • Self hosted CA - As always you can create your own Certificate Authority for your local network. This generally is done inside a corporate network to issue certificates to internal sites. This way you can install unlimited certificates and save yourself from spending thousands of dollars. But obviously the browsers do not know about your own CA, unless you tell the browser explicitly. We shall see how to do that later on.  

Some browsers will let you go through after clicking on the Accept and Continue button but in some situations they may not even give you an option to Continue. Chrome is one such browser. For those circumstances, there is a bypass available.

Type the below text exactly as it is shown(without spaces) anywhere on the window and the browser will let you visit the page. You don’t need to focus on any field. Just click anywhere on the window and start typing.

thisisunsafe

Sometimes it’s not apparent instantly as there is no feedback that you have entered the bypass. If you have typed in correctly, chrome should reload the window automatically. The bypass adds a temporary exception for that particular domain to chrome’s internal storage.


Modification History

2025-02-18 : Article Created