Viewing Server Certificate Details in IE

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Viewing Server Certificate Details in IE

This section provides a tutorial example on how to view certificate details when visiting an 'https' Website in IE.

When you visit a "https" Web server, it will send its certificate to your browser. Server's certificate is needed by the browser for 2 reasons:

Your browser must validate the certificate to determine that the Website can be trusted or not before doing any further communications.
Your browser must use the public key in the certificate to help secure the communication messages sent and received.

Normally, your browser will do these 2 tasks automatically without your interaction. You don't need to know where is the server certificate and what's in the certificate.

But since I am interested to learn more about "https" communication, I want to see the server certificate. Here is what did on IE to see details of the server certificate.

1. Run IE and go to https://login.yahoo.com and wait for the log in page to be displayed.

2. Click the lock icon at the end of the Web address field. A small pop up windows shows up.

3. Click the "View certificates" link on the pop up window. The Certificate dialog box shows up. The General tab tells me this information:

This certificate is intended for the following purpose(s):
* Ensures the identify of a remote computer

Issued to: *.login.yahoo.com
Issued by: DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA
Valid from 8/30/2018 to 3/3/2019

4. If you click the Details tab, you will details of this certificate:

Version               V3
Serial number         06 51 34 66 b7 46 b9 44 a0 c6 99 7c f5 63 a8 1d
Signature algorithm   sha256RSA
Issuer                DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA
Valid from            Thursday, August 30, 2018 8:00:00 PM
Valid to              Sunday, March 03, 2019 8:00:00 AM
Subject               *.login.yahoo.com
Public key            RSA (2048 Bits)
...