Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server

Hi, this happens to me on my Smile internet banking. I've also posted a thread about this. Unfortunately, I have no idea why. Safari 4 was fine for me.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2455307&tstart=0

Yeah I have a similar problem with my account section on Orange UK.

It worked in safari 3 absolutely fine, just on 4 and 5 it hasnt.

I have to use IE8 or FF3.6 for it to work.

Nope sorry it doesnt, it also works in FF but kinda slow (shouldnt be on a 20Mbps connection)

Confirmed that I can not access your site through Safari 5 windows or Safari mobile but I can access it on Mac Safari 4 and 5. We are experiencing the same issue for our secure sites since the release of Safari 5.

Is your certificate installed directly on the server or is there something in between (reverse proxy, etc)?

Thanks for that link! It let me track down a similar problem. It looks like it's only occurring with Safari 4/5 and Vista/Win7. The certificates seem to be in order, and trusted by the Windows cert store.

In our case, it looks like the problem is either the SSL protocol level, or the cipher selection used by Safari - it tries to open a connection with TLSv1 (which is SSLv3.1), and then doesn't like (without explanation) that the server answers in SSLv3, but with ciphers that otherwise could work in TLSv1 too.

It also seems that your server flat out refuses to communicate with TLSv1, and in my case the factors to bump into the same error were:

* the server only allowed sslv3 connections
* the server only allowed HIGH+MEDIUM ciphers

Changing either of those made Safari work for me. In particular enabling TLSv1 is a good idea. I can't tell what Safari thinks when it fails making the connection, frankly the error message is not that descriptive - it may be a Safari issue after all. Now how to report it...

RichardWest wrote:
How did you disable TLSv1 in Safari to test that out?

I couldn't - it may be possible, but I don't know how. What I could do is drop disabling TLSv1 on the backend, which at least in one specific case made everything to work (waiting for feedback in the other, may take a day more).

You may want to see if you can have the admins check your site's SSL settings.

Just by looking at the protocol conversation, it looks like Safari is the culprit, as it's closing the connection after a normal looking handshake without warning.