TLS certificate details are inadequate

[Peter Berry]

Binary package hint: pidgin

Trying to connect to MSN using Pidgin 2.5.0 on Hardy, I get a warning: "Accept certificate for login.live.com? The root certificate this one claims to be issued by is unknown to Pidgin." Clicking on "View Certificate..." however neglects to tell me who this root CA is. All it shows is the "common name", SHA1 fingerprint, and dates of activation and expiry.

[Forest (foresto)]

Agreed. Pidgin is asking me to decide whether to accept a root certificate based on insufficient information. Useless. I'm attaching an example, which appeared today when connecting to google talk.

[Forest (foresto)]

I'm using pidgin 1:2.4.1-1ubuntu2.2 on ubuntu hardy.

[Cory Dodt (corydodt)]

With Google Talk it's worse - the popup keeps coming back no matter how many times you accept it. How can I make this *go* *away*.

[Martin von Gagern (gagern)]

I would wish for a feature to export the certificate, so that I can work with other tools (like openssl) to get more details, verify it externally, or whatever. This is especially important for XMPP servers, as getting at their certificate outside a Jabber client is tricky business at best.
See also related bug #302314 about recent causes for such error messages.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version.Thanks in advance.

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

Tools -> Certificates -> select certificate -> Get Info still shows only common name, fingerprint, activation date and expiry date. Not the root CA.