Adding and distrusting certificates

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Two things can be decided about this machine's trust, and both are values under Machine\System\Trust\Certificates.

Trusting a certificate authority #

An internal CA, a test CA, a partner's CA:

$ trust add corp-ca /path/to/corp-root.pem
added corp-ca
  CN=Corp Issuing CA,O=Example Ltd,C=GB
  SHA-256 4f2a…c19b

The name is yours to choose — it names the decision, not the certificate, so corp-ca is a better name than 4f2a. PEM or DER is accepted; a file holding more than one certificate is refused, because a bundle added under one name would be one decision covering several authorities.

The certificate is checked before it is written: it must parse, it must be a CA (basicConstraints), and it must not have expired. trustd checks it again when it reads it — it never trusts the writer — but doing it here means a mistake is a message rather than a line in a log.

To undo:

$ trust remove corp-ca

Purposes #

By default an addition is trusted for ServerAuth — validating a TLS server. Say otherwise if you mean otherwise:

$ trust add corp-ca corp-root.pem --purposes ServerAuth,CodeSigning

This version renders ServerAuth roots and carries the rest, so a root recorded for another purpose is stored faithfully and used when the feature that consumes it arrives.

Distrusting a certificate authority #

This is the one that has to work in a hurry, and it works on any certificate — one Mozilla shipped or one somebody added:

$ trust distrust 018e13f0772532cf --reason "withdrawn, see CA/B incident 2026-08"
distrusted 018e13f0772532cf809bd1b17281867283fc48c6e13be9c69812854a490c1b05
  was: CN=DigiCert TLS ECC P384 Root G5,O=DigiCert\, Inc.,C=US

Within a second or two the root is gone from the store, gone from the rendered bundle, and its file is gone from the hashed directory. Nothing is rebuilt and nothing is rebooted, which is the reason the shipped roots can be package data in the first place: withdrawal never waits for a package.

A certificate is named by its SHA-256 fingerprint — never by subject name, which is forgeable and reused. Any of these work:

018e13f0772532cf                      the prefix `trust list` prints
018E13F0…C1B05                        upper case
01:8e:13:f0:…                          colon-separated, as other tools print it
/path/to/the-certificate.pem          the file itself

Distrusting a certificate this machine does not have is legitimate and is recorded rather than refused — the entry sits there, and if that root ever arrives in a bundle upgrade or an addition, it is already refused.

To see what has been decided, and to undo it:

$ trust list --distrusted
018e13f0772532cf  withdrawn, see CA/B incident 2026-08

1 distrusted

$ trust restore 018e13f0772532cf
restored 018e13f0772532cf809bd1b17281867283fc48c6e13be9c69812854a490c1b05

Doing it from the registry #

trust writes registry values and nothing else, so reg does the same job and is subject to exactly the same access check:

Machine\System\Trust\Certificates\
  Add\<name>\
    Certificate   REG_BINARY    the certificate, DER
    Purposes      REG_MULTI_SZ  default ServerAuth
  Distrust\
    <fingerprint> REG_SZ        why, for whoever reads it later

Write Certificate last when creating an entry by hand. Until it exists the entry is incomplete, and trustd deliberately skips incomplete entries rather than acting on half of one.

This is also how a domain distributes trust: pushing a value to Trust\Certificates\Add on every member is an ordinary policy write, not a special mechanism.

Packages may offer trust, never take it #

A package must never widen what the whole machine trusts by being installed — peipkg install quietly adding a CA is a supply-chain hole, and every system that allowed it eventually closed it.

A package that comes with a CA ships a seed (/usr/share/regim/…), inert until an image names it in [registry] autoapply or an administrator applies it. Installing the package grants nothing.

A package shipping a trust store for its own private use — a browser, a language runtime — is unaffected by any of this. Those are ordinary files that only that program reads.

When the store is degraded #

$ trust status
health       degraded — cannot read /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla.crt: …

degraded means the last attempt to compose the store failed, and what is rendered is what was rendered before — possibly stale, never partial. The machine keeps working with the trust it last had.

The usual causes are a missing or damaged ca-certificates package, or a distrust list that would empty the store entirely. Fix the cause and:

$ trust reload

Skipped entries are different and are not a degraded state: trust status counts them and the log names each one.

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