Pale Moon forum

https://www.revistasauda.pt/Revistas/Re ... fault.aspx
opens normally on Edge

following error message:

Secure Connection Failed
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
(for the record I simply get a connection time-out so the website seems to be entirely down at the moment)

I just tried loading that page. It won't load at all with Pale Moon, instead a 'Secure Connection Failed' error page is presented. I also tried a couple other 'chromy' browsers, and the site loads fine. So it appears to me to simply be a case of 'mainstream' browsers ignoring errors from an incorrectly configured website.

(for the record, I am unable to connect to it regardless of browser in use, so there's more wrong there)
As for secure connection failures... quite possible the site is using insecure ciphers or a bad certificate chain. I'll see what qualys says if it is available for others.

EDIT: oh this is weird. Qualys shows no issues whatsoever... In fact, the report there gets an A rating and is a configuration that Pale Moon definitely should not have an issue with... Colour me confused.

Well plugging in my VPN in Portugal showed me the loading attempt the OP was talking about. They are apparently severely access restricting visitors.

It does create a secure connection but it never serves any data and just renegotiates constantly until the connection is terminated while it was still loading.
Either way not much more to see on this end, it does seem to be a misconfiguration of either the server or the immediately surrounding networking (the traceroute is also weird)

As far as I can see it is a browser issue.
The site loads fine with Firefox and even with Waterfox Classic (based AFAIK on Firefox 56) while Pale Moon gives the "Secure Connection Failed" message.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.

gepus wrote: ↑

2022-09-16, 08:59

As far as I can see it is a browser issue.
The site loads fine with Firefox and even with Waterfox Classic (based AFAIK on Firefox 56) while Pale Moon gives the "Secure Connection Failed" message.

That doesn't mean a thing. Both Firefox and Waterfox Classic have a "connect at all costs" approach to https. Pale Moon does not.
However, you may try setting security.tls.version.max to 3 (= restrict maximum TLS version to 1.2) and see if that helps (try reloading the page after you've done that). It's annoying for me to test because obviously, I am being locked out if I don't appear to bein portugal...

If it helps then the webmaster needs to get off of their arse and update their webserver software to not use a draft TLS 1.3 specification. If you want to have a bit more fine-grained temporary solution, you can set security.ssl.enable_tls13_compat_mode to true and restart the browser to enable the potentially insecure draft spec mode in Pale Moon until such time as you are either no longer using the site or they have updated their software. In this case you should know that Firefox allows this potentially insecure spec at all times (no control mechanism for it) and I don't know if Waterfox Classic even supports TLS 1.3, but if they do it's probably the same thing.

The fall back setting fixes the issue with this site.

Unfortunately there are still several sites using an old TLS specification.

gepus wrote: ↑

2022-09-16, 12:59

Unfortunately there are still several sites using an old TLS specification.

This is why I say you should contact the site administrator so they can fix this. TLS has been finalized for years now, they really shouldn't still be using stuff that is using some draft spec that is not standard and potentially vulnerable (I don't think it's been audited in detail but afaik there were clear concerns which is why it was changed in the finalized spec)