Hi,

I asked Fedora's ca-certificates maintainer to comment on this. I didn't fully understand his reply, but he says this was some sort of mistake in Debian's package and not an upstream problem: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1845988#c3

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So mozilla lists relevent changes between NSS processing and the raw cert trust database here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Additional_Trust_Changes . NSS was indeed whitelisting accepted intermediates, but it also didn't explicitly removed the target CA's from the trust list. It now uses CKA_NSS_SERVER_DISTRUST_AFTER to handle how it distrusts the given CA's.

I've verified that the cert has not been removed from the current trust list, but CKA_NSS_SERVER_DISTRUST_AFTER has been set in the latest version. This means if the certs issued from this CA was issued after the specified date, then the trust would be distrusted, otherwise it will continue to be trusted.

I suspect Debian took out the certs from the trust store altogether, rather than process the list straight from mozilla.

Upshot: if you process CKA_NSS_SERVER_DISTRUST_AFTER, then you will get safer behavior, otherwise the ca's are still trusted in the latest list.
"""

I suspect you have more broken certificates that need to be restored than just GeoTrust.

Furthermore, last time we had a major Debian-specific certificate verification issue, we discovered that Debian is not actually capable of restoring previously-removed certificates without manual user intervention, see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=743339. That means that even once these certificates are restored, users who have already updated to the affected version of ca-certificates will suffer permanently broken certificate verification unless they have found this bug report and know to take manual intervention, because the certificates will remain disabled locally.

Michael

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