How to fix NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID with GoDaddy certificates
Newly issued certificates, like GoDaddy's R1, are not natively trusted by all systems yet. This triggers "NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID" or untrusted website warnings that block users from browsing the site or downloading clients. To fix the trust chain on picky servers like IIS, administrators must manually download specific intermediate or cross-root certificates directly from the GoDaddy repository.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Downloading and applying cross-signed certificate bundles or intermediate chains from the provider repository.
- 2Updating the trust chain in the trusted roots of the firewall or VPN host.
- 3Using external tools like ssllabs.com to verify the chain of trust.
- 4Installing cross-signed certificate bundles to ensure backwards compatibility with older client trust stores.
- 5Ensuring intermediate certificates are installed directly into the local machine's CA store rather than the user account.
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Some client reported "NET :: ERR\_CERT\_AUTHORITY\_INVALID" while browsing. Tested on Chrome on iPhone encountered same error but no problem on Edge of my desktop pc.”source ↗
“had a similar headache with godaddy certs and IIS a while back, the intermediate bindings in IIS can get weirdly picky even when the chain looks fine in mmc.”source ↗
“We have an R1 cert that is not natively trusted by all systems yet, so I have been having to download something from the GoDaddy repo (DV R1 With Cross to G2 includes Root) in order to fix the issue on other servers so that they will be trusted.”source ↗
“When users go to the website to download the VPN client the website is untrusted.”source ↗
Where this came up
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