Irritating Security Alert

vivski · 14 Apr 2018

I keep getting a Security Alert relating to a certificate issued to *.cloudflare-dns.com, issued by DigiCert ECC Secure Server CA. If I check the Certification Path is says that the certificate is OK.
The security alert says that 'A secure connection with this site cannot be verified. Would you still like to proceed? The certificate you are viewing does not match the name of the site you are trying to view.'
I have no idea what site this is, or what is causing this alert to keep popping up, it started a week or so ago and clicking on the No button closes the alert and a new one pops up almost immediately.
Does anyone have any idea how I can track the source of this irritation please?

EdTittel · 14 Apr 2018

Sounds like you've chosen Cloudflare's DNS servers at 1.1.1.1 and possibly also 1.0.0.1 as your DNS servers. If accessing those servers brings certificate issues along with it, that would explain what you're seeing. That said, I just changed my DNS assigments to those addresses, and I'm not getting any such error message. You may want to check your IPv4 properties for your active NIC and see if it looks like this:

If it does, you could try changing those addresses to Google's temporarily 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (IPv6 addresses are 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844). If making that change (or those changes) causes the alert to go away, that would count as proof positive that something is amiss with Cloudflare's certificate(s).
I'm incredibly curious about what's going on here, so please follow up, won't you?
Thanks,
--Ed--

vivski · 14 Apr 2018

Thanks for the quick response Ed.
I have just checked my IPv4 and IPv6 properties and they are both set to obtain an IPv6 address automatically and obtain DNS server address automatically, so it looks as if the problem is elsewhere.
I am wondering if it is connected with Evernote as I when the pop-up occurs and I hover my mouse over the icon in the task bar it shows up there. I have no idea what I might have done to introduce something to a not in Evernote which could be associated with this problem.

EdTittel · 14 Apr 2018

Yes, I had feared it might be something else when I couldn't reproduce your problem simply by switching to Cloudflare's DNS servers. You might want to check the Application log in event viewer to see if this is causing any events to be logged. That could provide a strong clue as to what might be up. OTOH, you could try visiting the Cloudflare Community Forum to see if anybody else is reporting something like this. Otherwise, I'm stumped, too, sorry!
HTH,
--Ed--

vivski · 14 Apr 2018

Thanks for trying Ed. I will also try Evernote's forums to see if anyone there has any ideas.

vivski · 16 Apr 2018

It appears that the solution is to uninstall Evernote and then reinstall it. Since doing that I have not experienced this problem.

EdTittel · 17 Apr 2018

Nice work @vivski. Thanks for running this to ground, and for sharing your solution with the forums. Much-appreciated.
--Ed--