Showing Server Certificate in Apple Safari

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Showing Server Certificate in Apple Safari

This section provides a tutorial example on how to show server certificate when visiting an 'https' Website in Apple Safari.

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

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 Apple Safari to see details of the server certificate.

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

2. Click the lock icon at the left side of the URL address area. The page security dialog box shows up with the following message:

Safari is using an encrypted connection to login.yahoo.com

Encryption with a digital certificate keeps information private as it's sent
to or from the https website login.yahoo.com.

3. Click the "Show Certificate" button. The server certificate summary shows up. The first part is the certificate chain showing how the server certificate is certified by PKI authorities. The second part provides a summary about the server certificate.

DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance EV Root CA
 |- DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA
     |- *.login.yahoo.com

*.login.yahoo.com
Issued by: DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA
Expires: Thursday, September 3, 2020 ...

This certificate is valid