How do I remove all trusted certificates

Lawrence Finch wrote:

As this replied to me...

The Trust Store does not contain trusted certificates. In simple terms, The Trust Store contains the digital signatures of issuers of the SSL certificates that are used to encrypt access to websites and email servers.

These are called root certificates, yes, and these public certificates are the so-called root of trust for the entire public key encryption and authentication system used by Apple and ~everybody else, and removing the list of root certificates will disrupt ~everything requiring network connections or authentication. iOS, updates, app connections, verifying app signatures, verifying the identities of servers, ~everything. It'll effectively if not actually "brick" the iPhone.

The trust store version has absolutely nothing to do with security vulnerabilities.

It's not directly related in the absence of a certificate authority breach or reseller breach, certainly.

Within the current public key encryption model with commercial certificate providers, there are folks which do have concerns over particular certificate issuers; over particular certificate authorities.

Certificate transparency is an effort to clarify that, though not everyone prefers to depend on that.

And Apple does not provide a ready means to remove a particular root certificate on iPhone and iPad. Which limits the changes that can be implemented within the root store.

The root certificate store also gets updated as mentioned, as certificate authorities make changes and/or are added or removed, and/or update their root certificates or intermediate certificates, etc.

If you keep your Apple product updated to the latest version of MacOS or iOS it will be protected against all known vulnerabilities, despite whatever nonsense has been posted in the forum. 

There is an ample supply of nonsense in the world, yes.

The Trust Store does not contain trusted certificates. In simple terms, The Trust Store contains the digital signatures of issuers of the SSL certificates that are used to encrypt access to websites and email servers. There are billions of SSL certificates in use around the world. They are issued by a relatively small number of agencies and companies (Called Certificate Authorities, or CAs), who, as part of the process of issuing the certificate, verifies that the site is legitimate. When you visit a website the certificate from that site is sent to your browser. Your browser then verifies that the certificate was issued by one of the agencies whose signature is in the Trust Store. If the signature is not in the trust store you see a warning that the site may not be what it seems. The Trust Store is updated as part of an iOS update. It will change whenever the list of certificate authorities changes, which is very rare. The Trust Store version is actually the date and time the trust store contents were last updated. So, for example, version 2022012800 was last updated on January 28, 2022 at midnight.

The trust store version has absolutely nothing to do with security vulnerabilities. If you keep your Apple product updated to the latest version of MacOS or iOS it will be protected against all known vulnerabilities, despite whatever nonsense has been posted in the forum. 

Erasing the iPhone is an easier and more direct way to render the iPhone non-functional, as erasing the root store will have the same effect and will render the device unusable.