How to Quickly Fix Your Connection is Not Private on Google Chrome

In this short tutorial, you will learn how to bypass the “Your connection is not private” message in Google Chrome. While this fix will work for most websites, it won’t work 100% of the time.

Warning!

Please do not proceed without considering the consequences. As the error message itself states:

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from example.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards).

Google Chrome is trying to protect you. The error message might read ERR_CERT_INVALID or ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID which means there is a problem with the SSL certificate that’s installed on the website that you are trying to access.

In case you’re not familiar, an SSL certificate is what gives a website HTTPS. The “S” in HTTPS means secure. Websites that use the HTTPS protocol are secure because the data transmitted over the internet is encrypted from prying eyes.

Only if you fully trust the website that you are trying to access, then it’s okay to proceed. Otherwise, you are putting yourself at risk to have any potential sensitive data intercepted by a hacker.

Connection is not Private Workaround

To get around the “Your connection is not private” error message in Chrome, you simply need to type the following while the page is visible.

thisisunsafe

There’s no text box to type it in or anything like that. The browser is programed to listen for this combination of characters at which point will bypass the privacy error and allow you to proceed to the website.

In fact, you can actually see this in the source code for Chrome.

* @param {string} e The key that was just pressed.
*/
function handleKeypress(e) {
// HTTPS errors are serious and should not be ignored. For testing purposes,
// other approaches are both safer and have fewer side-effects.
// See https://goo.gl/ZcZixP for more details.
var BYPASS_SEQUENCE = window.atob('dGhpc2lzdW5zYWZl');
if (BYPASS_SEQUENCE.charCodeAt(keyPressState) == e.keyCode) {
    keyPressState++;
    if (keyPressState == BYPASS_SEQUENCE.length) {
...

In this case, the window.atob function converts the base-64 encoded string ‘dGhpc2lzdW5zYWZl‘ to plain text ‘thisisunsafe‘. You can try this conversion yourself.