Internet Explorer – Unable to Continue to Site due to Invalid Certificate

Posted by: Jonathan Agosta (February 11th, 2012)

In some scenarios, users trying to access sites with invalid certificates (self-signed being the most common in my case) will NOT have the option to continue to the site. This is likely due to the “Prevent Ignoring of Certificates” group policy being enabled.

Thankfully this security is more of a “security by obscurity” rather than something this is actually programmed into the software. If you right-click on the page in question and look at the properties, you will see the address is like this:

res://ieframe.dll/invalidcert.htm?SSLError=16777216&PreventIgnoreCertErrors=1#https://some-site-url

The workaround as you can probably guess is to change the PreventIgnoreCertErrors=1 to PreventIgnoreCertErrors=0 keeping the #https:// url portion intact.

You can do this by copying the URL I have above and replacing the some-site-url with the actual site you mean to reach and pasting into IE’s address bar. You will still get the cert error, but you will now have the option to continue to the site in question. If you then follow-up with the usual method to get around self-signed certs by adding site to trusted locations and installing the cert, you won’t have to use this workaround for that site again.

Hope it helps.