“Server certificate untrusted” error in iPhone app

Question

I am using my iPhone application on my iPhone 3G OS 3.0.1 without any problems. The application connects to an API URL at https://api.serverdensity.com/1.0/ and all requests go through it.

A user of the app has reported that they are now suddenly getting an error "untrusted server certificate". No other users are experiencing this issue (that I'm aware of) and I cannot reproduce it.

The SSL certificate is a wildcard certificate on *.serverdensity.com. It is purchased from GoDaddy and is valid until May 2010.

Further, the user is running OS 3.0.1, the time/date are set correctly on the device and if he visits the API URL in Safari, it loads up correctly.

Any suggestions for the cause of this?

Answer 1

Early iOS and android devices came with a smaller-than-desktop-browser database of root certs. You need to concatenate your intermediate CA certs with your server cert and have the web server send them all down to the phone. Later iOS and android releases fix this by including more ca certs on-device.

Answer 2

I saw the same error message on a jailbroken test phone I had, but not on my other test phones. I never investigated it further, but thought I would mention in case that helps...

Answer 3

I had the same problem!

Did you install there "Intermediate Certificate Bundle"? If you don't then you will get the untrusted server certificate on all mobile platforms (and some PC ones as well).

Web Site Quote:

Before you install your issued SSL certificate you must download and install our intermediate certificate bundle on your Web server. You may also download the bundle from the repository.

Check out the GoDaddy SSL install instructions for your web server setup.

The Intermediate Certificate Bundle can be found here.

Answer 4

Please verify the Date and time setting of your iPhone or iPod, if you are facing the error saying "untrusted server certificate".

After correcting the Date and Time from iPhone/iPod "Setting". It will automatically takes care all applications(i.e. Yahoo messenger, Citrix, Push mail ....etc) encounters "Untrusted server certificate" issue. Just give try. Hope it will be a little help for you. Thanks.

Answer 5

I would confirm that your phone can load any https:// urls without warning. I have an old 3.1.3 iPhone that for some reason warns about every cert it encounters. Not sure what the reason is but it makes it almost useless for testing of my web service.

Answer 6

It looks like everything checks out with the installation of the certificate. All of the Intermediate certificates are being sent by the server: http://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html?hostname=api.serverdensity.com