MSN Certificate Error

MSN recently changed the certificate used on some of their servers. This certificate is used to negotiate a secure socket layer (SSL) session, an encrypted connection, between the client (Windows Live Messenger, Pidgin, etc.) and the server(s).

Unfortunately, this new certificate is signed by a root certificate that Pidgin does not provide. You may not see this problem if your distribution provides the root certificate and has configured Pidgin to use it. The error message you'll see is something like this:

Unable to validate certificate:
The certificate for local-bay.contacts.msn.com could not be validated. The certificate chain presented is invalid.

or:

Unable to validate certificate:
The certificate for local-blu-people.directory.live.com could not be validated. The certificate chain presented is invalid.

If you're reading this page, you're probably experiencing this problem. Here is the solution.

How Do I Fix It?

Upgrade to Pidgin 2.10.7 or newer

Note: Pidgin 2.10.7 has not yet been released, but you should follow these instructions when that happens.

In Pidgin 2.10.7, we will began distributing the additional root certificates that the MSN's servers are using.

I upgraded but it's still broken!

Did you restart Pidgin after you installed the new version? If not, do so.

If you did restart Pidgin, the reason is probably that you built the new version of Pidgin yourself. You also probably neglected to remove the copy of Pidgin you installed through your package manager. Try running ldconfig as root (sudo ldconfig or similar). If that doesn't work, you can remove the packaged version of libpurple (libpurple0 on Debian and Ubuntu systems; it will have different names elsewhere) and try ldconfig again. Ideally, however, you should install a packaged version of Pidgin, as you won't have to compile it and you won't have to play with ldconfig or removing packages to make it work.

If upgrading is not possible

If you can't upgrade to Pidgin 2.10.7 or newer, then here's how to partially fix the problem.

Note that while we verified the certificates we instruct you to download below, there is always a risk involved in downloading certificates, especially ones you have not personally verified, from a website and adding them to your trusted CA store. Ordinarily you should avoid this practice. Instead of following the instructions below, we strongly recommend upgrading to Pidgin 2.10.7 or newer, which include the certificates and other fixes.

Get the new root certificate

If you have followed other (incorrect) instructions to replace the 'local-bay.contacts.msn.com' or 'local-blu-people.directory.live.com' certificate, then you must delete that certificate from Tools->Certificates first.

Download ​Baltimore_CyberTrust_Root.pem, then follow the appropriate set of directions below.

Windows

• Save the files to C:\Program Files\Pidgin\ca-certs (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Pidgin\ca-certs as appropriate)
• Restart Pidgin

Linux

• Save the files to /usr/share/purple/ca-certs (or /usr/local/share/purple/ca-certs as appropriate)
• Restart Pidgin