Navy College/SMART

[JustinHEMI05]

I am trying to get official copies of my SMART transcript, but I can't get into any of the navy NKO sites. I keep getting an invalid security certificate error. Am I doing something wrong or is there something wrong with those sites right now?

Thanks

Justin

[navsteve]

Must be the website.  I got the same error.

[sovbob]

This is a problem that NKO (and similar government sites) experience.

Because it's required to use HTTPS, with an SSL certificate (the traditional method of encrypting web pages) the NKO website needs a Certificate Authority (CA) to validate their SSL certificate.

There are a number of accepted Certificate Authorities that authenticate SSL certs.  These include Verisign, Thawte, Geotrust, and GoDaddy.  They are essentially trusted 3rd parties.

The NKO website doesn't use these trusted 3rd parties, and instead has their certificates authenticated by the U.S. Government.  Your browser doesn't recognize the U.S. Government as a CA, hence the certificate error.

There should be a way to override that, in your browser's security settings.

[navsteve]

I tried from my home computer and works fine.  Must be a setting you can change.

[JustinHEMI05]

Thanks guys I will check it out.

[JustinHEMI05]

Hmm I still can't figure it out. Both FF and IE8 are giving me these issues on both of my home machines. Weird.

[sovbob]

When attempting to access these websites, it should give you a giant glaring warning about the certificate not being signed by a trusted CA.  It should also give you the option of continuing to the website anyway.

Go ahead and click on the "Yes, I know what I'm doing. Take me to the website" link.

If you're still having troubles, PM me and we'll get it straightened out.

[JustinHEMI05]

Yes you are correct, it lets me do that in IE8, but not FF. I wonder if the the fact that I have my router going through opendns has anything to do with it? But I don't know much about these things so I am just guessing. Thanks for your help thus far.

[goobs22xx]

I get the "Invalid client certificate" error when I try to access my application status on the STA-21 website. Turns out, you have to be at a CAC terminal to be able to get to it now....

I have been able to "add exception" for NKO and things of that nature. Hopefully yours is just a browser issue and not the former.

[JustinHEMI05]

Yeah I did get it to work somehow on my netbook using IE. I forget what I did exactly, I think I just got lucky.