Resolving Mixed Content warning from external insecure server - https

I have a https site and need to show content from other sites that may or may not be themselves https. Predictably enough, I'm getting warning messages like this in the console...
"Mixed Content: The page at 'https://www.example.com/' (my server) was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure image 'http://www.aninsecuredomain.com/image.jpg'. (not my server) This content should also be served over HTTPS."
(not to the mention the fact that I no longer see the little padlock displayed properly in most browsers who now consider my site's network insecure).
I've read through a bunch of posts on SO on this topic, but I can't seem to find a definitive answer on whether there's anything I can do when I don't own the external servers (so can't guarantee they'll have a https version). Appreciate any thoughts on whether this is possible, and if so how I could go about achieving it!

When you need to include content from another domain in an https webpages you can:
Make the owner of the other domain commit to https by explaining him the security reason behind that
Proxy the content through your website or host it yourself (if you have right to do it)
(If you don't see the padlock anymore it's because your page is no longer secure because it include insecure elements that could have been tempered: it's not they "consider my site's network insecure", it is indeed insecure!)

You should use the // prefix. (instead of http[s]://)
On an https page, the secure version wil be loaded.
On on a plain http page, the plain http version will be loaded.
Edit your theme replacing every occurence of http://fonts.googleapis.com/... with //fonts.googleapis.com/...

Related

Is removing scheme from URL good practice?

I've got a site where I recently started using SSL and now in console I'm getting a couple of errors;
Mixed Content: The page at 'https://www.XXXXX.com/' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure stylesheet 'http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Serif'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.
I've read that I could specify the stylesheet as: //fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Serif and omit the http:// or https:// and let the browser determine which scheme/protocol to use, but I'm surprised I've not seen this before and wondering if this is good practice?
For example, in my Wordpress theme development where I am frequently using wp_enqueue_style should I now use this format by default, assuming where you're calling from is able to serve both?
I'm considering just redirecting all traffic to the https version of the site, but still interested to know if this URL scheme is good practice or not?

Why do some websites that have SSL not work but still load if using the HTTPS version? How can I avoid it if I make a website?

Sometimes, if I go to a website, such as this one through an HTTP link, it looks fine and works as apparently intended:
However, if you change the address to be HTTPS, the page loads without any browser warnings but looks really weird and seems broken—spacing is messed up, the colors are wrong, fonts don't load, etc.:
All of this same stuff happens in both Firefox and Chrome on my computer.
What causes this to happen? How can I avoid this if I make an HTTPS-secured website?
For me the browser tells you what is wrong in a warning message. Parts of the page are not secure (such as images).
What does this mean? The developer of the site has linked some content such as CSS, JS, or images using HTTPS links and some using HTTP links.
Why is this a problem? Since some content is being retrieved over an insecure connection (http), it would be possible for malicious content to be injected into your browser which could then grab information which was transmitted over https. Browsers have had this warning for a very long time, but in the interest of security they have hedged their behavior on the more secure side of things now.
What will fix this? There is nothing we can do as consumers of the website. The owner of the site should fix the problem. If you are really interested in viewing the site and not concerned about security, you can temporarily disable this protection from the URL bar warning message in Firefox.
As #micker explained, the page looks weird because not all of the sources are loading since their connections could not be made securely and the website's ability to load those sources are being denied by the browser for not being referenced using a secure connection.
To elaborate further. in case it's still not quite clear, a more accurate and technical explanation would be that, for styling a webpage, the Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is the language used to describe the presentation of a document or webpage in this case, and tells the browser how elements should be rendered on the screen. If you consider these stylesheets as sort of building blocks, where you can combine them together to define different areas on a webpage to build one masterpiece, then you would see why having multiple building blocks for a site would sound pretty normal.
To save even more time, rather than try to figure out the code for each and every stylesheet or "building block" that I want to include, I can burrow someone else's style sheet that has the properties I want and link to it as a resource instead of making or hosting the resource myself. Now if we pretend that there's a stylesheet for every font size change, font color variance, or font placement, then that means we're going to need a building block to define each of those
Now, If I am on a secure connection, then the browser ensures that connection stays secure by only connecting to other sites, or resources, which are also secure. If any of the sites containing the building blocks of CSS that I want to use but are not secure, AKA not using SSL (indicated by a lack of "s" in "http://" in their address), then the browser will prevent those connections from happening and thus prevents the resources from loading, because the browser considers it a risk to your current secure connection.
In your example's particular case, things looked fine when you entered only http:// without the https:// because the site you were visiting doesn't automatically force visitors to use SSL and lets you connect to it using the less secure, http protocol, which means your browser is not connecting securely to it, and therefore won't take extra steps to protect you by blocking anything outside of that since you're already on an insecure connection anyway. In which case, the browser doesn't need to prevent sources that are coming from an insecure connection or sites because in a way, your connection is already exposed so it can freely connect where it needs to and load any resources regardless if they can be transferred securely or not.
So then, when you go to the "https://" version of the site, there are no browser warnings because you're connecting to that site with a secure connection and unfortunately that also means that if the designer of the page had linked resources from somewhere that just didn't have an SSL connection available or didn't update the link to go to the new https:// standard, then it's going to be considered insecure and since you're on a secure connection, the browser will block those connections which means blocks those resources from being able to load, making the page load incomplete with not all of its building blocks. Build blocks that tells your screen to move all the text on the right into a panel and to have a blue font color while changing to a different font face. Those definitions defining the look and appearance didn't make it through and so those sections adopted whatever existing stylesheet is present which normally don't match with what was intended to be there.

Opening HTTP content within HTTPS

We have a HTTPS website and I need to display a HTTP website (any external website) into my page. The website used iframe for displaying it. We realised that it doesn't work in mozilla firefox. We are getting a "mixed content" error. I am searching for an alternative to iframe now. I understand that it makes no sense to bypass the security warning. We also do not want to change any browser settings as it is possible that all the users may not have permissions to change browser settings. Using tags like <embed> or redirecting in <div> tag also gives the same problem.
Is there any way to do this in C# code and not using HTML and scripting.
Response.redirect() does not work in our application. I do not have a problem if the page is redirected but I prefer a dialog/popup window for the external website to display.
This is simply a security consideration. Your HTTPS site is not truly safe when using mixed content.
Use HTTPS for your external site, period.
As Mozilla suggests:
The best strategy to avoid mixed content blocking is to serve all the content as HTTPS instead of HTTP.

firefox has blocked content that isn't secure

I am running a site. Some of its pages are not working in Firefox, but work perfect in Chrome. In Firefox it shows me a gray shield next to the URL and when I click on that shield and manually click on disable protection on this page then my page works fine. So now the problem is that there are many users on my site, and some of them don't know how to do it so I want to handle it on my site so its users don't need to do that.
How can I do it? I Googled and found a setting of Firefox in about:config named security.mixed_content.block_active_content. If we set it to false then it works. So is there a way to do it programmatically or other way so that users just view that page without seeing that shield?
As I understand it, content that is blocked by default by Firefox now is http content that is accessed from an https page. Common types of content that fall foul of this are external stylesheets and images.
As far as I am aware the way to prevent the problem on your site is to make sure that if a page is served by https, any and all other files that it references are also served by https.
Hi Friends,
The reason you see this error in Mozilla Firefox is because your
website is a Mixed Box that is, your website has many internal links
which are not SSL protected.
In order to avoid this error from showing up in Mozilla Firefox you
will have to make sure all the internal links on your website are SSL
protected.
So, Use https:// in your page not http://
I hope I was clear enough in answering your query.
firefox has blocked content that isn't secure means there are some contents on your website are not secure.
I had same issue as my fonts were downloading with http://google.apis.something instead of https
Then I change to //google.apis.something and problem get solved.
To know what is not secure in you website use this link

get feedburner feed on httpS

We are grabbing our feed at feedburner by using the jquery jGFeed plugin.
this works great until the moment our users are on a httpS:// page.
When we try to load the feed on that page the user gets the message that there is mixed conteent, protected and unprotected on the page.
A solution would be to load the feed on https, but google doesn't allow that, the certificate isn't working.
$.jGFeed('httpS://feeds.feedburner.com/xxx')
Does anyone know a workaround for this. The way it functions now, we simply cannot server the feed in our pages when on httpS
At this time Feedburner does not offer feeds over SSL (https scheme). The message that you're getting regarding mixed content is by design; in fact, any and all content that is not being loaded from a secured connection will trigger that message, so making sure that all content is loaded over SSL is really your only alternative to avoid that popup.
As I mentioned, Feedburner doesn't offer feeds over SSL, so realistically you'll need to look into porting your feed to another service that DOES offer feeds over SSL. Keep in mind what I said above, however, with respect to your feed's content as well. If you have any embedded content that is not delivered via SSL then that content will also trigger the popup that you're trying to avoid.
This comes up from time to time with other services that don't have an SSL cert (Twitter's API is a bit of a mess that way too.) Brian's comment is correct about the nature of the message, so you've got a few options:
If this is on your server, and the core data is on your server too, then you've got end to end SSL capabilities; just point jGFeed to the local RSS feed that FeedBurner's already importing.
Code up a proxy on your server to marshall the call to Feedburner and return the response over SSL.
Find another feed service that supports SSL, and either pass it the original feed or the Feedburner one.
i have started using WordPress paid theme Schema for my several blogs. In general, it is a nice theme, fast and SEO friendly. However, since my blogs are all on HTTPS, then I noticed that if I had a widget of (Google Feedburner) in the sitebar. The chrome will show a security error for any secure page with an insecure form call on the page.
To fix this, it is really simple,
you would just need to change the file widget-subscribe.php located at /wp-content/themes/schema/functions/ and replace all “http://feedburner.google.com” to “https://feedburner.google.com”.
Save the file, and clear the cache, then your browser will show a green padlock.
and i fix this in my this blog www.androidloud.com

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