SSL Bad Certificate Format error blocking management interface

No amount of user recreation of the SSL certifcate will solve this problem, as the root cause is that the digital certificate issued to Netgear by the top level Certificate Authority via their Registration Authority is no longer trusted in the wild.  Modern browsers either refer to a downloaded list of currently trusted top and subordinate CAs used to perform their validation checks, or by sending the public key of the questioned certificate to a Validation Authority.  When it becomes known that a subordinate CA or VA has become breached and theft of a private key has occurred for a particular subordinate CA, such as Netgear, then the PKI system is notified along with the browser developer, such as Chrome, etc, and they mark that signature certificate as invalid, producing the error we're seeing.  To solve the problem, Netgear needs to perform a product update that includes a new digital certificate issued by a trusted top-level CA that is trusted by the browser and other SSL applications.

Meanwhile, with the existing Netgear digital certificate in the product used for creating PKI keys for sessions with the product, there is a distinct possibility of a variety of malicious security attacks possible.  Beyond the hassle of over-riding the errors produced by the browser, that can sometimes be band-aided by setting the browser to ignore the threat.  Scary stuff.  Us end users cannot "fix" this trust, as if we could then the entire Web Of Trust that PKI is based upon would collapse since a black hat could regularly do the same thing as we could.

This is a Netgear problem that only they can fix. They surely have already obtained a new top-level trusted CA-issued set of keys for their own subordinate CA to generate certificates for their products...they likely just haven't bothered to do that for this NAS product, at least I haven't yet seen a firmware update with it yet.