How To Fix NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID Error On Google Chrome

There is a problem’s with the Certificate Authority that issued the SSL certificate

If you’re here, it’s likely you arrived at a website using Google Chrome and received an error about a Certificate Authority being invalid. This is an issue that needs to be fixed by the website owner or manager. It’s a potentially serious issue that shouldn’t be ignored or bypassed.

What causes the ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID error?

There’s two main reasons you’re receiving this error:

• Either the Certificate Authority that issued this website’s SSL certificate isn’t trusted, or
• The certificate is self-signed.

Note that invalid certificates like this are sometimes used by hackers to impersonate a trusted website, so you shouldn”t ignore this message. Either way, the best you’re going to be able to do is contact the website’s owner and notify them about the problem.

In some cases there may be a way around this “your connection is not private” error if you manually add the root certificate that the SSL certificate was issued from to your system or browser’s trust store. We would only advise you do this in very specific situations (such as you’re an IT guy and your company is using a Private CA).

But our best advice for users would still be to contact the site owner and wait for them to fix it.

How To Fix NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID Google Chrome Error for Site Owners

There’s one of two things that have happened to get this error, as we covered, either you self-signed your SSL certificate or your Certificate Authority (CA) is no longer trusted by the browsers. As we have seen with WoSign, StartCom and Symantec, having your CA distrusted is not unheard of.

Either way, unless you’re a large enterprise working alongside a CA to set up a Private CA for your massive network, our advice is to purchase an SSL certificate from a trusted authority.

Not to toot our own horn, but Comodo is universally trusted by all browsers and root store programs, you will never get an ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID error with a Comodo SSL certificate installed on your website.