Internet Explorer 7 - Certificate Warning

If like me you have been playing around with Internet Explorer 7 there is an interesting and generally useful security feature where certificates are checked prior to loading the page and if there is a problem with the certificate it loads an intermediate page warning you of the problem that looks like this.

It does give you the option of carrying onto the page you are trying to get to such as this.  Notice the address bar is coloured red and it gives a clue why with the certificate error message to the right.  My situation was that I was using a different DNS name in the URL to make life easier for myself (lazy I know!), after a few days I got sick of doing this and tried to find a way around this issue.

Manual Solution

Well there is an entry in the advanced tab of Internet options in IE7 near the bottom of the list called ‘Warn about certificate address mismatch’, and by default this is checked.  If you uncheck it you can restart IE and go straight to the URL with no problems and no warnings on the Address bar giving you this.

Registry/GPO Solution

This can be useful for getting rid of the annoyance, but if you are willing to take this chance and you have Web Apps or Services that you have given ‘friendly’ names that aren’t on its certificate, and to stop users from worrying when they get this error then you can make an adm template to change the following registry key:-

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"WarnonBadCertRecving"=dword:00000000

The key is set to 1 by default, to turn the feature off set the key to 0.