Comment 11 for bug 1645253

I have a workaround to propose, could not post on askubuntu because I had no reputation score.
Before I get flamed, just to reiterate the word **workaround**.

Firstly, the .deb installer on Ubuntu is just a live installer that pulls EXE files from sourceforge.net, we know the files are at https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/files/the%20fonts/final/.

What you need to do is to download all of them, put it into a <whatever>/corefonts/ folder.
Host a simple web server on <whatever>, the simplest is starting up a NodeJS web server.
I had an active Apache instance that I could use, so I did not need Node.

Next, we need to add a temporary host entry into /etc/hosts file:
<ip address of your server> downloads.sourceforge.net

Then, we need to temporarily allow APT to accept an invalid SSL cert, which I followed from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/317695/is-it-possible-to-have-apt-accept-an-invalid-certificate

Cleanup the previously failed installation just to be sure
sudo apt-get purge ttf-mscorefonts-installer

And then reinstall:
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Once done, naturally undo the temporary steps, and you are good to go.

IMHO, this way is better than other suggestions because it properly marks the package as installed neither needing to "apt mark hold" nor using debian repository .deb installer.

Hope this helps.