Since installing OS X 10.9 Mavericks, I’ve been plagued by problems with security certificates. I couldn’t visit Twitter or LastPass using Safari or Chrome. And I couldn’t log in to Messages or FaceTime. But after a fair bit of research, I found a solution.

Thank goodness for Apple Support Communities’ archives. Someone had the same kind of problem with OS X 10.7 Lion, and by following the steps suggested, I fixed all the problems mentioned above. This should work for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion as well.

I’ve adapted the following from that posting:

Close all Finder windows except for one. Choose Applications, then open the Utilities folder.

Launch Keychain Access and click on System Roots on the left, and then click on Certificates on the bottom left.

Check to see if any of the certificates on the right have the blue “+” symbol (see below) – this means they have custom trust settings. You’ll have to change each one individually.

Double-click on each certificate with the custom setting (blue “+”), expand the section labeled Trust. Change the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) setting to “no value specified”. Close the window, and you should be prompted for your password.

Double-click on the certificate again, expand trust again, and change the When using this certificate setting to “Use System Defaults”. Close the window and enter your password again.

If you didn’t re-enter your password upon closing the window, the setting didn’t take. When it takes, the blue “+” should disappear after a few seconds. Once all of the certificates are changed back to default, you should be able to access those troublesome sites and services.

A big thanks to “quickSti” for posting this information to Apple Support Communities!

Short link: http://goo.gl/PvsJrk

searchword: securitycertificate