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My place of employment offers an internet connection for its employees to use. The connection is protected, and employees must sign in with a username and password that is unique to them. The connection however does not work when attempting to access a site that uses HTTPS, and I receive the following error:

"Your Connection is not Private" Error

I am a new employee, but existing employees have told me that this has been a long-standing issue. Since getting in touch with the network administrator has proven futile, I have to figure out what I can do on my end to bypass the problem. Ideally, I would like to set up a VPN server on my home network that I can then use while on my employer's connection, but I do not know if that is going to work.

What can I do, if anything, to resolve this issue on my end?

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  • Your employer is most likely intercepting HTTPS traffic for scanning. Typically this error can be resolved by adding the content filter's certificate as trusted on your device. Even after doing this, however, some sites will continue to have issues if they are set up to detect that your work is intercepting your traffic.
    – Josh
    Sep 11, 2015 at 20:13
  • How would I go about doing that?
    – DaveTheMinion
    Sep 11, 2015 at 20:15
  • Well before adding the certificate, I'd make sure that this is what your work is doing. Just to be on the safe side.
    – Josh
    Sep 11, 2015 at 20:16
  • The connection is intended for use when we are on break, so as long as I am not doing anything downright stupid, I should not get in any trouble.
    – DaveTheMinion
    Sep 11, 2015 at 20:17
  • I meant that you should make sure that it's your work that is intercepting the traffic and not anything else potentially malicious.
    – Josh
    Sep 11, 2015 at 20:17

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As Josh R has commented on your question, it's likely that your employer is intercepting your traffic for the purposes of filtering what you can access, or logging your traffic, or both.

Using a VPN to connect to a server outside of your employer's LAN would likely avoid this problem. Using a VPN to avoid HTTPS issues, while effective, could be considered by your employer to be an attempt to avoid the filtering system, which your IT department probably wouldn't take too kindly to - it's probably specified in your IT Acceptable Usage Policy.

If you simply want to avoid the HTTPS error, you'll need to get a copy of the public key for the root CA (certificate authority) from your network admins, which you can then install on your device.

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