alt Hacker NewseMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
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Somehow this is making it even worse. Like, I'm having issues explaining the whole thing to my wife, because I can't come up with a metaphor or parable that's even remotely as ridiculous as what they've done. Anyone's got a good one?
Maybe, like, setting up a factory that builds both LHD and RHD cars and building cars with two passenger seats in the front for two years straight without anyone noticing?
Related: the absolutely brutal question battery the Chrome team publicly submitted to eMudhra
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- 4 -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
The big takeaway here is: Web PKI is fundamentally broken, and the existence of CAs as a concept is the vulnerability that must be fixed -- or, more specifically, the idea that ultimately trusting a relatively small, basically fixed/hard-to-change set of (mostly) commercial entities with something this critical and far-reaching is (or ever was) actually a good idea.
There are a lot of reassuring statements from browser makers and others about how their mitigations for exactly this scenario kicked in and protected (some set of) Internet users, but IMHO there is not nearly enough discussion happening about fixing things so those mitigations are not needed to begin with.
"There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA’s."
This seems like a weird statement given that anyone can issue certificates out of the affected CAs.
> eMudhra handled the recent incident diligently, revoking the affected CAs within 14 hours of discovery
Is 14 hours a diligent response time for something like this?
> About eMudhra / With over 17 years of expertise, eMudhra is a global provider of digital identity, trust, and security solutions, enabling secure digital transformation for banks and financial institutions (BFSI), enterprises, and governments across more than 35 countries worldwide. Its product suite spans CertiNext
I was hoping the statement at the bottom would be written in past tense: eMudhra was a global provider of digital identity ... had temporarily enabled secure digital transformation ... Its product suite spanned CertiNext...
"eMudhra’s global SSL/TLS infrastructure runs separately from its other operations. The company’s Global digital signature certificate (DSC), eSign, and other signing services, including those in India, its enterprise PKI Solutions (emCA, CertiNext platforms), emSigner eSignature Suite, and its identity and authentication solutions (SecurePass, emAS) are not affected and continue to operate as normal."
So they didn't even use their own certificates? :)
> However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business
This isn't what taking responsibility looks like.
> eMudhra handled the recent incident diligently, revoking the affected CAs within 14 hours of discovery and disclosing promptly
It doesn't end there. It ends when you've investigated how this happened, identified the causes, and changed your procedures, systems, and/or culture to make sure it doesn't happen again.
eMudhra stock is down 20% [1] There is a real financial consequence of bad posture. I am confident they were passing the compliances; everything was 100%.
We have been operating in India for a while. People do not take security, processes, etc., seriously in India. At least most of the organizations do not. Most likely, a human error caused the incident, and guardrails could have prevented it.
The sad part is that even after a major incident like this, the org is probably not going to invest in tools and processes to improve their posture. They will only do what is necessary to meet compliance. This is just the nature of a market driven by low margins and low-quality vendors.
There is no malice here by the org; it is just unfortunate.
> There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA’s
Adding "out of the affected CA's" is top PR weasel wording that will slip by non-technical people who read this.
Congratulations to those who wrote or prompted this statement.
> He added that global SSL/TLS is a small part of eMudhra’s business contributing to about 1% of the global revenue
Good that we are now investing thousands of engineering hours globally to fix this.
Several tech stacks require upgrades of their runtime, python is an ungodly mess with certifi, but yes. It's just 1% of your revenue.
Sorry, it's been a long week.
All I'll say in response is: Good!
If this company was so incompetent that their private keys were a single byte, I seriously wonder what other areas they're incompetent in but that they've ventured into anyway. When you fail so spectacularly and so publicly at something like being a certificate authority, in the manner that eMudra did, it's rather hard not to wonder.
According to this blog [1], it has now been almost 5 days since a researcher reported to Apple that the eMudhra CA certificates were compromised.
As I am writing, my iPhone 15 Pro is still accepting certificates signed by these compromised CAs. The device is "up to date", yet is still running Trust Store Version 2026073000. When I check at [2], certificates issued by 3 eMudhra Intermediate CAs are still being trusted!
Google Chrome revoked these certificates in 1 hour 40 minutes, Mozilla in just under 4 hours.
I am so astonished by how much Apple has failed here. There are potentially huge swathes of people completely oblivious that their phones are susceptible right now to being man-in-the-middle attacked.
Why does the iPhone not utilise a CRL list? Why does it take Apple 5+ days to do what Chrome did in under 2 hours.
It's a similar story for my MacBook, but at least there my Chrome browser _does_ use a CRL (the same can't be said for all the programs installed, however).
[1] https://fenko.nz/blog/emudhra-ca-compromise/#what-happened-i...
"will sharpen focus on... trust services other than SSL/TLS"
Is there some reputation left to salvage here that I'm not aware of? Who would trust them?
There is no valid reason my computer should come preloaded with 100+ trusted certificates from many jurisdictions that all can sign certs for all domains.
Only a few major CAs in jurisdictions that admit heavy scrutiny and legal liability should operate. Country-specific CAs, if any, should only be scoped to signing certificates for their respective ccTLDs.
Reminds me when Trustcor CA got booted off the root stores: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-polic...
Popcorn recommended for the read!
Consider the barn door securely locked. Sorry about the horse.
There's a formal press release in here:
https://emudhra.com/en/press-release/emudhra-to-exit-global-...
> Its infrastructure was not compromised and no data was breached.
The private key of your globally trusted CA is infrastructure data and it was breached.
> All physical and logical security controls remained intact.
No, because you promised the CA Program that those keys would be HSM generated, FIPS 140-2 level 3 compliant. Ain't no compliant HSM in the world that will generate "4" as a private key.
> There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA's.
I charitably read this as "revoking these weak CA didn't affect customers". But now your whole root is being revoked next week (which you forgot to mention). All your TLS customers get screwed.
Overall, good choice to give up, but lying on your way out is not a good look for a company with the tagline "Trust Delivered".
I just wonder how many times private keys were lost by or stolen from by slightly less incompetent companies?
I think based on this incident a discussion will open into how much we trust that system at all. With the level of espionage tactics some countries are keen to show the rest of the world, I personally assume absolutely anything can be sniffed.
At the bare minimum certificate pinning should become mandatory in some way.
> However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business.
What a weak minded statement. Just admit you messed up and call it a day.
Internet2 provides InCommon Certificate Service, issuing certificates from "InCommon Intermediate CA" which chains up to emSign Root CA - G1. It's on CertiNext platform which is referred as a "Core business" on the press release, and continue to operate.
As long as they continue to support the surviving root cert, they are beholden to the root program and need to be accountable for this incident.
So far their responses to critical questions in the Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449) have been rather weak and delayed.
CA Forum, Apple, Google and Mozilla are to be blamed for just giving license to random no security background far away company.
Beware even the countries internet regulatory authority (NIC) issued rogue certificates in past, about time NIC's root certificates should be ejected once and for all.
https://security.googleblog.com/2014/07/maintaining-digital-...
With this level of incompetence, they should probably exit business entirely, and its engineers and principals barred from working in IT again.
> Chairman ... indicated that eMudhra handled the recent incident diligently, revoking the affected CAs within 14 hours of discovery and disclosing promptly
So the top still doesn't understand (it's not diligent), wouldn't you expect the other 99% of the business to be managed just as "diligently"
> "There were no end entity certificates issued"
Isn't the problem that anyone can/could issue end entity certificates with those certificates as "parent"?
For context: eMudhra pays[0] its software devs around 500 USD per month as salary
People who are still facing this on a mac (like I was) - something I tried (and I am not sure this fixes it or not - or at least somewhat):
went to keychain access app and found all emudhra and emsigner certs -> there were 4 -> clicked "get info" for each -> under Trust section of the pop-ip -> selected "When using this certificate: Never Trust".
Now all checks on https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com pass for me.
Their other businesses seem to be cryptography/trust related. What exactly do they do? TBH I have no clue how you trust their "enterprise PKI Solutions" when they've demonstrated a total failure to generate secrets. Am I off the mark? Do they do anything that you don't need to trust their process for?
Certinext is owned by eMudhra and is (was?) the current provider for InCommon certificates used by many US .edu sites.
There’s an element of nationalism in this episode, amplified by the Indian government. This company, eMudhra, is a publicly listed private company. But the union government of India nevertheless felt obligated to downplay the issue (it always goes with a denial about any issues reported) and even went on a belligerent tone.
Quoting from a news report [1]:
> The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Wednesday said it has taken “serious note” of the reported security incident involving eMudhra’s Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and has formed a special team to investigate the matter.
> The ministry also warned against what it called “fear mongering” on social media over the possible impact of the incident.
The company’s stock is down to the lower circuit on the stock exchanges for the last two days. This exit may be a decision to stem the beating that the stock has taken. I personally believe the stock will sink further, as it deserves to.
Trust once lost, especially in a shameful meme worthy way such as this, isn’t going to be gained back easily.
[1]: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/impact-has-bee...
There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA’s - that you know of
The company’s Global digital signature certificate (DSC), eSign, and other signing services, including those in India, its enterprise PKI Solutions (emCA, CertiNext platforms), emSigner eSignature Suite, and its identity and authentication solutions (SecurePass, emAS) are not affected and continue to operate as normal - maybe to a full review of those? Are you rolling your own crypto there by chance?
you can't fire me -- i quit!!
Well, from a practical standpoint given the sheer incompetence that was on display they were “exiting” the certificate business regardless of their “decision” to do so.
This incident separately raises deep questions about the competency of the company to do much of anything in the security or compliance space.
There is an interview here with the co-founder discussing the event: https://www.thehindu.com/videos/emudhra-incident-could-have-...
I cant comprehend how they were able to put something like "4" as the private key. someone said that they could have used a rand generator from 0 - 255 instead of 256 bytes one. but anyway, I don't remember putting a private key value manually and always generated it with something like keygen.
Recent and related:
mitmproxy adds --emudhra option - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189232 - Oct 2026 (139 comments)
Your MCU likely escaped the eMudhra intermediate CA compromise - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50183280 - Oct 2026 (26 comments)
Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177916 - Oct 2026 (445 comments)
eMudhra intermediate CA compromise - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166579 - Oct 2026 (491 comments)
How much did they make over the years? Is it true that they issued 60 million SSL certificates (I read this but couldn't verify it)?
I would expect rule-of-law to have consequences for a failed root CA before entrusting a nation with another.
> However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business
GOOD. RIDDANCE.
You cannot take these people serious. They should never ever touch something serious again.
> All physical and logical security controls remained intact.
Did the HSM have a fault, or was the key generation script at fault?
I suspect the later given the choice to exit the business. If they had strong evidence that a FIPS-compliant HSM misbehaved, I suspect they'd be more willing to fight this.
Too late, I hope lawsuits will make them pay dearly for their gross negligence.
Wow this press release is a real PR disaster. It's really just about their business value. Starting the statement with "a global digital trust company" is so ironic on that context.
> However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business
Scrutiny is inversely proportional to bit complexity of the private keys they used. Without a failure to apologize or expose how it happened: a human mistake, process mistake, etc. this looks pretty bad on them.
> eMudhra’s global SSL/TLS infrastructure runs separately from its other operations. The company’s Global digital signature certificate (DSC), eSign, and other signing services, including those in India, its enterprise PKI Solutions (emCA, CertiNext platforms), emSigner eSignature Suite, and its identity and authentication solutions (SecurePass, emAS) are not affected and continue to operate as normal
Anyone relying on them with anything related to security or trust is playing Russian roulette at this point.