Table of Contents
Before you begin
Before we go into the details, I must warn you that use this ONLY when you know why this bypass exist. Or at least go through this article and understand the implications. Using this bypass on every other site can risk your personal data (including passwords) being stolen. And you know what happens when your password gets compromised.
SSL Warnings
Some browsers may complain about invalid certificate and block you when you try to visit a regular page even when the site has an SSL certificate installed. Apparently the security of any website depends on whether the certificate is from one of the trusted authorities. We shall see later what a trusted authority means.
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.
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.
Bypass Chrome Security Warnings
To bypass the warning:
Type thisisunsafe anywhere on the window and the browser will let you visit the page.
