"Safari is unable to establish a secure connection"

Old question: new answer. What worked for me today was to make sure that my system time is current. Trying a solution to an older problem I had set my system date to about 4 years ago. Changing it back to "Set automatically" corrected the problem for me. It seems like safari could provide a better response that indicates the certificate times are YEARS different and verify the system time is near (within a day or so) of just about any server on the network.

Usability and less frustration.

Did you ever find the answer to this problem? I just updated OS with latest security update 10.5.8 and Safari to Version 5.0.5 (5533.21.1) two days ago. Since then, I'm having the same problem exactly as you described it, even with rebooting fixing it temporarily. Safari is also sometimes just plain freezing up. This all started after the updates, so I installed Google Chrome, but now it is doing the same thing. My internet connection is good, because no trouble on another computer.

Are your Date, Time and Time Zone set correctly on the Mac, susan? The message suggests that you might be having trouble with the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, and a common cause of that is if the Date, Time and Time Zone are wrong on the computer.

(One way of doublechecking to see if it's SSL trouble is to try to go to the iTunes Store in iTunes. iTunes also uses SSL for Store connections, so if there's an SSL problem you should also get an "A secure network connection could not be established" message from your iTunes too.)

Hello B Noir,

Thank you for your suggestion. I did check the date, time and time zone and they are correct. I also was able to open the iTunes Store without any trouble. I actually had trouble getting back to this page, because I was getting the error message trying to open it, and had to reboot to reply to you. I realize that I didn't give any detail except to say it sounded like exactly the same problem that timiteo was having.

I installed updates to Safari 5.05, and OS security updates to 10.5.8 two days ago. Since then, Safari keeps getting hung up and/or giving me this error message:

"Safari can’t open the page.

Safari can’t open the page “https://intuit.com/login/” because Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server “intuit.com”."

This happens on numerous websites and does not happen consistently. In other words, I just received the error message when I tried to open my gmail calendar from within gmail. Other times, it has opened without trouble, and after rebooting, I am now able to open it again (this is adding up to a lot of rebooting today).

I then installed Google Chrome (so I could get some work done), but after a short time, it started doing the same thing with this error message:

"SSL connection error

Unable to make a secure connection to the server. This may be a problem with the server, or it may be requiring a client authentication certificate that you don't have.

Error 107 (net::ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR): SSL protocol error."

Once I get the message, then I can't do anything with the particular browser until I reboot, which solves the problem for a short while. Actually, once I see the message in one browser, it is sure to happen in the other browser right away as well. I had none of these problems before I installed the updates, so I'm wondering if there is some conflict in the 10.5.8 OS security updates, since it doesn't seem limited to Safari.

I'm not running any virus software on the Mac. I do have Parallels running a virtual Windows machine on the same laptop and I have Norton Antivirus running on Windows, but I don't even have Windows started up. I used to have Norton Antivirus running on the Mac "side" - but I uninstalled that months ago, because it was bogging everything down.

I appreciate any ideas you may have.

Susan

ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

🙂 ... a thank you to Chrome for the more detailed error message. So it probably is an SSL issue, but not one of the Date/Time/Zone variations.

It makes sense that you got the Safari version of this here at Discussions too ... you're connecting by https rather than http when you're browsing/replying here.

It is plausible that something went wrong during the 10.5.8 update for you, because one of the issues addressed by that update related to SSL, as per the following document:

Mac OS X v10.5.7: Cannot verify identity of website using custom Certificate Authority in Safari or Mail

Judging from that document, the issue that you've developed miiiight relate to trouble in your keychain post the 10.5.8 update. But keychain troubleshooting is beyond my competence, I'm afraid.

If a keychain troubleshooter would care to leap in at this point to help with susan (or even to say "no it's not keychain trouble"), I'd be much obliged.