Safari, Keychain, Certificate, SSL, HTTP – Resolving Issues with Safari Connecting to HTTPS

certificatehttpkeychainsafarissl

Safari suddenly can't connect to any HTTPS site because it "can't establish a secure connection".

This is on an administrator account, not a managed account.

A different administrator account is able to use Safari with HTTPS, so must be something specific to my account, but I have no idea what.

Google Chrome has no problems connecting to HTTPS sites.

Things I have tried:

  • emptied Safari's cache
  • deleted Safari's preferences
  • reset Safari entirely
  • repaired Keychain (no errors found)
  • deleted Keychain (didn't help)
  • repaired permissions in Disk Utility
  • rebooted
  • hoped it would suddenly fix itself

All of the google results I saw suggested either repairing the Keychain (which I tried and which did not help) or were only applicable if there were "Parental Controls" involved, which doesn't apply here.

If I had to guess, I would think that wherever Safari is checking for "certificates" is somehow corrupted, but I could be wrong. I'm not even sure where to look for those – maybe ~/Library/?

Best Answer

A report on forums.macrumors.com seems to be fairly similar to yours. This happens as well in Safari 5.1 and is very recent.

The solution was to delete:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.plist
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