You guys might have encountered a warning saying that "Your connection is not private" while doing some web development. This tutorial is about how you can skip the same. (Feel free to skip the tutorial, if you are not using chrome or chromium-based browser)

You will get this kind of error usually when you are not using localhost as the domain for development. This is implemented to make your browsing experience more secure. If you are visiting a website via HTTPS and the server doesn't support it, you are vulnerable to the normal attacks that can happen when accessing a website via HTTP. You are vulnerable to the MIM (Man in the middle) attacks, these attacks a quite serious since it can gather private information like usernames and passwords from the victim.

But having this feature enabled while developing a web application is a headache. Organizations can set browser policies to prevent accessing such pages especially if you are using a machine provided by the company. The screen will look below:

As you can see that there will be no skip button on this. The only way you can access the page is by setting up a correct certificate or launching the Chrome browser in insecure mode via flags.

But there is a cheat code you can use to skip this warning 😄 Just type "thisisunsafe" in the chrome warning message page. (Not in the address bar, just type it in the page) Boom! 💣 You can see that the warning message disappeared.

To test this yourself you can visit: https://self-signed.badssl.com/

Congrats, You've just added a permanent exception for the corresponding domain for the SSL certificate check. 😄

Technical details

• Chromium source code: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/components/security_interstitials/core/browser/resources/interstitial_large.js
• Stackoverflow thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35274659/does-using-badidea-or-thisisunsafe-to-bypass-a-chrome-certificate-hsts-error

Stay safe, Happy coding.... 😷