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Using Selenium and webdriver to interact with insecure SSL pages in Firefox

Interacting with insecure SSL pages (eg. self-signed) in an automated test written for Selenium is an important feature. Especially when tests are getting run against locally served test pages. Under those circumstances you might never get fully secured websites served to the browser instance under test. To still allow running your tests with a successful test result, Selenium can instruct the browser to ignore the validity check, which will simply browse to the specified site without bringing up the SSL error page.

Since the default driver for Firefox was switched in Selenium 3.0 to Marionette by default, this feature was broken for a while, unless you explicitly opted-out from using it. The reason is that Marionette, which is the automation driver for Mozilla’s Gecko engine, hasn’t implement it yet. But now with bug 1103196 fixed, the feature is available starting with the upcoming Firefox 52.0 release, which will soon be available as Beta build.

Given that a couple of people have problems to get it working correctly, I wrote a basic Selenium test for Firefox by using the Python’s unittest framework. I hope that it helps you to figure out the remaining issues. But please keep in mind that you need at least a Firefox 52.0 build.

Here the code:

import unittest

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities

class InsecureSSLTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

def setUp(self):
self.test_url = 'https://self-signed.badssl.com/'

capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX.copy()
self.driver = webdriver.Firefox(capabilities=capabilities,
firefox_binary='/path/to/firefox/binary')
self.addCleanup(self.driver.quit)

def test_page(self):
self.driver.get(self.test_url)
self.assertEqual(self.driver.current_url, self.test_url)

if __name__ == '__main__':
unittest.main(verbosity=2)

By using DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX the default capabilities for Firefox will be retrieved and used. Those will also include “marionette: True“, which is necessary to enable webdriver for Firefox in Selenium 3. If not present the old FirefoxDriver will be utilized.

To actually enable accepting insecure SSL pages, the capabilities have to be updated with “acceptInsecureCerts: True“, and then passed into the Firefox’s Webdriver constructor.

That’s all. So enjoy!

Update: The capability for acceptInsecureCerts is set automatically when DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX is used.

23 thoughts on “Using Selenium and webdriver to interact with insecure SSL pages in Firefox”

  1. Homer says:

    How is this done i C#. I cannot do DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX.copy() nor have I any constructor matching webdriver.Firefox(capabilities=capabilities,
    firefox_binary=’/path/to/firefox/binary’)

    Reply
    1. Henrik Skupin says:

      Hi Satyanarayan, I’m not a Java expert and don’t know about the Selenium Java bindings at all. I’m sure while scanning the example code you might be able to figure out what to use for Java. Best, Henrik.

      Reply
      1. Satyanarayan Panigrahi says:

        Hi

        Thanks for your reply..
        As per my understanding i am using below java code. But its not working.

        System.setProperty("webdriver.marionette.driver","C:\\Program Files\\AFTv1.4\\Selenium\\geckodriver.exe");
        ProfilesIni profile = new ProfilesIni();
        FirefoxProfile myProfile = profile.getProfile("default");
        myProfile.setAcceptUntrustedCertificates(true);
        myProfile.setAssumeUntrustedCertificateIssuer(false);
        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(myProfile);
        driver.get("https://l4dridap1273:8446/web/retirement4x/login");
        driver.close();

        Reply
          1. Satyanarayan Panigrahi says:

            Hey

            As per your suggestion i am using desired capabilities now.
            Still no luck here

            DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
            capabilities.setCapability(CapabilityType.ACCEPT_SSL_CERTS, true);
            capabilities.setJavascriptEnabled(true);
            capabilities.setCapability("marionette", true);
            System.setProperty("webdriver.marionette.driver","C:\\Program Files\\AFTv1.4\\Selenium\\geckodriver.exe");
            WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(capabilities);
            driver.get("https://l4dridap1273:8446/web/retirement4x/login");
            driver.close();

    1. Satyanarayan Panigrahi says:

      package demo1;

      import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
      import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
      import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;

      public class Executer2 {

      public static void main(String[] args){

      DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
      capabilities.setCapability("acceptInsecureCerts", true);
      capabilities.setJavascriptEnabled(true);
      capabilities.setCapability("marionette", true);
      WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(capabilities);
      System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", System.getProperty("user.dir") + "/geckodriver.exe");
      driver.get("http://www.google.com");
      driver.close();

      }

      }

      Reply
        1. Henrik Skupin says:

          Sorry but I cannot provide solutions for all Selenium bindings. I just gave one for Python, and we got another one from Satyanarayan for Java – which is great. I don’t think that it will be too complicated for you to adapt those for the Robotframework.

          Reply
          1. Manoj says:

            First of all Big Big thanks to Henrlk for explaining this is so beautifully. I am able to bypass SSL Certificate issue with Selenium Webdriver 3..3.1 and FireFox 52.0.(Binding with Java)

            All you need to do is
            DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
            capabilities.setCapability(“acceptInsecureCerts”, true);
            WebDriver wd = new FirefoxDriver(capabilities);

            Thanks,
            -Manoj

          2. Wallace Chen says:

            Hello,
            This is the RobotFramework version as below:
            ${ffdc} Evaluate sys.modules[‘selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities’].DesiredCapabilities().FIREFOX.copy() sys, selenium.webdriver
            Set To Dictionary ${ffdc} acceptInsecureCerts=${True}
            ${BROWSER_ID} Selenium2Library.Create Webdriver Firefox capabilities=${ffdc}
            Go to https://self-signed.badssl.com/

  4. David Mankellow says:

    Hi Henrik,

    I am still encountering issues with this. I am using Python, with Selenium 3.3.1, GeckoDriver 0.15.0 and FireFox 52.0.1. With the following code snippet:
    caps = DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX.copy()
    caps[‘acceptInsecureCerts’] = True
    self.DRIVER = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=self.GECKODRIVER,
    capabilities=caps)

    But I now get a horrid error from webdriver:
    File “/Users/dmankellow/git/ssc-product/mgmt/appliances/rbt_ssc/src/test/baxter/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py”, line 727, in set_page_load_timeout
    ‘pageLoad’: int(float(time_to_wait) * 1000)})
    File “/Users/dmankellow/git/ssc-product/mgmt/appliances/rbt_ssc/src/test/baxter/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py”, line 238, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
    File “/Users/dmankellow/git/ssc-product/mgmt/appliances/rbt_ssc/src/test/baxter/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py”, line 193, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
    WebDriverException: Message: Message:

    Sorry for the crude stacktraces. Any known bugs at all?

    Reply
  5. Davis says:

    Great write up, I can get your sample code to work but for my setup I need to use a specific firefox profile to utilize some certs I have already imported. Do you know how I can force it to use a specific profile as well?

    Reply
  6. Aleksandar Kostadinov says:

    FIY for ruby and geckodriver 1.8 the accept certs option is not set automatically. I have to do:

    caps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.firefox accept_insecure_certs: true
@browser = Watir::Browser.new :firefox, :profile => firefox_profile, :http_client=>client, desired_capabilities: caps
    Reply

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