Concepts / Encryption and trust

Encryption and trust

Trust store

Also called root store, CA bundle, ca-certificates, update-ca-certificates

The list of root certificates a device trusts; every certificate it accepts chains to one of them.

Operating systems ship a vetted list (Mozilla's, on Linux) and organisations add their own roots, on Alpine in /usr/local/share/ca-certificates. update-ca-certificates builds the bundle programs read, /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt. A root in the store vouches for every certificate it signs, for any name, so adding one is a decision with weight: an intercepting proxy works exactly by getting its root added.

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