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.
Waiting for a release like "... the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to OTP 1FA place in our business. In view of this, after detailed deliberations our board has concluded that withdrawing from global OTP 1FA is the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders"
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.
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?
The king was very careful to ensure all the gatekeepers were following the process correctly. It did not occur to anybody that one of the gatekeepers could be using a dirty rag to jam their gate closed instead of a lock.
Once discovered, the wall could be trivially bypassed. The security of the whole internet was immediately broken. Rebuilding the wall to block up the dodgy gate took much effort from very many people.
Normally, the king would declare and sign a proc stating that anything signed by his secretary's "unforgeable" signet was to be respected as well. The secretary could delegate authority to others in turn.
Well turns out that one of the signets in the chain of trust was just a picture of a "four" that anybody could have forged, but nobody noticed because in all of the ceremony and stacks of parchment with wax seals, nobody actually checked if the signet was secure.
However, Kings likely benefitted from the option of a scapegoat, they could always blame someone for forging their unforgeable seal and have them killed, rather than admit that the seal was true.
If we add in attainder and escheat, the King had a pretty strong hand.
As it turns out, these documents were mostly useful for long-lived décisions, which could be overturned, and where a forgery exposed you for a lifetime.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_III_of_Artois#The_fraud...
for the non technical folks: imagine there was a password that if you guess it, you can impersonate *any website on the internet*
now imagine the password is literally the number 4> "We set up a system where every government and a bunch of random banks and IT companies in the world holds the secret codes to everyone's encryption. Then we make them pinky swear not to abuse it, with stern talkings to if they do. And now it's all on fire, because one of them was irresponsible!"
You can know the intractability of the problem that PKI is solving, and the (worse) alternatives that have been tried, but that doesn't make this system not-insane to a normal person, and its at least a little bit the fault of the collective "us".
And it's not like it is an impossible problem; we rely on TOFU for SSH, we have remotely-attestable TPMs everywhere, ZKPPs / PAKEs exist, session keys and federation protocols are widespread. Somewhere in the set of "possible solutions" are options that don't sound unhinged when you explain how we got to this eMuhdra situation.
Then, everyone who trusts the CA will trust your certificate by checking it is signed by the CA who should have done the checks to ensure your certificate contains truthful data.
So your layman description of “they have secret codes to everyone’s encryption” is completely wrong.
As a 90s kid, the Dodge Omni was a common shitbox student car. I think they had like 8 key patterns lol.
My brother’s ignition key unlocked my friends’s trunk. There were a few people who could start other peoples cars. In one case, a soccer player “stole” a football players unlocked car as they looked identical and were parked near each other. In another as a prank we unlocked cars to roll them out of parking spots and physically lift them into unusual places.
I start by saying this is about the tech behind the S in HTTPS. I say that the main point of this is that when you talk to foo.com, it has to prove that the people behind foo.com are on the other end, so it's safe to send them your encrypted password or whatever.
Then I say a bit about how the system works by having a small number of trustworthy companies vouch for other people's servers. This doesn't need too much technical detail to get the point across.
Then I say one of those "trustworthy" companies put an encryption key of 4, where it's supposed to be a long number that's hard to crack. This makes the verification easy to forge.
Then I say that everybody who runs a server needs to remove this company's bad key, and Windows or Mac or your phone needs updates too. And that your web browser probably already quietly removed it, which removes a lot of the risk.
I feel like when I explain it this way people get it.
And when that clicks, extend the metaphor, literally, to a key with ~384 grooves.
The best example I can think is (some) international borders: yeah, they're heavily regulated entities with lots of written protections (and thousands of miles of impenitrable barricades), but occassionally a hole opens up (whether physically or engineered).
Perhaps a section of border fence is occassionally destroyed (and people sneak in), but this won't happen if the border guards are approving [false] passports from a compromised government actor ("they have a valid passport, according to our inspection"), the border fence doesn't even matter!
Presume anybody can now go to that bad-passport-issuing government and request a passport to then enter any other country (i.e. the other country will see the passport as valid in the official global database): BAM, borders no longer mean anything; welcome to Privileged Accessia.
Then the intern decides, “I can just glue these identical little white circles with blue sparkles onto the screw, and it will be faster and I can take more breaks!”
house collapses and people get injured.
concrete manufacture says we no longer build houses cause it’s too small of a business.
“That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage!”
Then they locked it with the key you find on a chew toy for a baby.
I'm actually being serious, I do judge companies by their logo and website design taste, and more modern-looking companies also tend to pay more attention to doing things properly.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189521
I suspect Apple published no update and is relying on the CA's CRL and/or OCSP to do its job. But it's rate-limited, the connections time out, and iOS is hard-coded to soft-fail.
Like you my trust store is months old.
That said, I found separate installs of Firefox and Microsoft Edge that accepted *all* the bad certificates without a care.
The only browser that consistently rejected all of them was — you guessed it — Internet Explorer. A browser so old it couldn't even run the test properly but it did what it needed to and blocked all the servers.
I am not smart enough to say how, but the sheer amount of work this created across the industry is monstrous. It probably has cost $billions to mitigate, and those mitigations have been slow and ineffective (see: my iPhone still being vulnerable).
In my experience, seemingly random pieces of software, libraries, and programming languages packaging their own CA stores has made this much harder to mitigate than simply running 'apt-get update ca-certificates'. We've practically just had to update every single thing to mitigate this.
Just now on M1 Pro Safari.
On M1 Prp Firefox: none.
On iPhone 17: Safari: none, Firefox: none.
I just tried on Safari, it still trusted 2/14 compromised chains.
Rubbish.
... 5 days later and I know better than to do online banking or messaging on my iPhone 15.
It would need to be a 3, 5, or 7, since a prime is required.
Note that p,q (the primes you’re thinking of) are not actually required for decryption. They enable you to calculate d, the decryption exponent, and also enable decryption-time optimizations (exponentiation with d_p and d_q followed by CRT recombination), but that’s optional. In fact, p,q can be computed from n, e and d.
Also note that using small numbers like 65537 for RSA public exponents is common practice.
Like, that had to be malicious right? ssh-keygen won't generate a key like this, and neither will openssl or whatever Microsoft is doing behind their CA server.
shrug
I think they're just absolutely inept and should never be trusted with anything security related as an organisation if this is a mistake they could make.
The key needs to mention which curve it is using.
Again you seem more concerned with grammar than, y'know, condemning racism, prejudice, or bigotry. They're all equally bad and closely related concepts. "A rose by another name" and so on.
Your own comment has 3 typos and several grammatical errors ("prejudiced to" is wrong, for example). Irony.
Finally, modern usages of "racism" encapsulate all of these meanings. Languages change over time.
> You can be prejudiced to any group of people, doesnt mean that you are biggoted
Yes, that's literally what it means.
All that said, I make this comment as I believe the other commenter's worry is on display im this comment here...
> Again you seem more concerned with grammar than, y'know, condemning racism, prejudice, or bigotry. They're all equally bad and closely related concepts
These are _not_ all equally bad. Prejudice is foundational to understanding, there is no escape from this. In this understanding, we should treat particular postures of prejudice more serious than collapsing any "bad prejudice" under the same label.
Do you think racism is worse than bigotry? Why? I understand that the first word has a more emotional charge in our times. But as far as "bad things to do" go they're equal in gravity. Racism is just a subset of bigotry.
> These are _not_ all equally bad
Why not?
> Prejudice is foundational to understanding
That's one definition of the word - "judging without knowing the facts".
But there's another definition - "an irrational hostile attitude, fear, or hatred towards a particular group, race, or religion" - which was the one we are operating with in this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness
I had a bunch of openwrt routers based on the ADM5120 SoC, some of them were of different endianness, totally wth:
But either way, I find the reduction of the argument to the semantics of the word racism to be deflection. Wouldn't you agree the original comment was made in poor taste? Why did it need to include a reference to Indian and imply that all things Indian made are cheap or low quality?
We applied this kind of mindset to the Japanese in the 60s and 70s, and look where that got us. I witness it happening again in the 00s and 10s applied to Korean electronics (LG and Samsung mostly) while we were content with minor improvements over the status quo and innovating far too slowly.
Yes, this incident has an almost farcical amount of stupid attached to it, but the fact that it happened to an Indian company is in my eyes only coincidental. There are plenty of Silicon Valley startups and tech companies that are equally cavalier about aspects of security and apply the mentality of "we'll fix it in post" to anything but shipping features.
Curious which language is that, and if "racism" is an accurate translation to English. What you describe sounds more like xenophobia.
> Racism is a form of discrimination in which a person is judged on the basis of his or her ethnic origin, skin color, nationality or religion. It is a form of prejudice and inequality that prevents people from gaining equal opportunities.
While I'm happy to admit that perhaps my use of the word in English is incorrect and its meaning there is more narrow, in Dutch it covers nationality or religion as well. Islamophobia is considered racist ("racistisch") in Dutch, for example.
Most companies handle security very badly.
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...
This seems like a weird statement given that anyone can issue certificates out of the affected CAs.
They just didn't mention that now anyone can be their own Certificate Authority.
Is 14 hours a diligent response time for something like this?
It was ~15hrs 30 minutes to first revocation
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.
It might even be sensible to intentionally revoke a small number of certificates every month, to make sure nobody is complacent.
My wife bought this fuckass IoT air purifier that's constantly phoning home. I'm gonna figure out what it's telling the mothership.
My wife still plays her freemium games, the ads just don't load. She took out one of those games when we were sitting at the airport once. She was frustrated that her once-pleasant strategy game was suddenly crammed full of ads for boomer slot machine apps, and I had to explain that the app had probably always been that way.
I am reminded of the US DST changes back in the 2000s: there was all sorts of drama because a lot of software is written in the US, and there was much 'computerization' in the 1990s, but US coders had never personally experienced a DST rule change during that time period, so any change needed a reboot to pick up the new rules.
That drama led to (e.g.) periodic dynamic checking of /etc/localtime on various Unix-y system.
Sometimes you don't realize that things can be improved until you experience situations in which they currently suck.
> He has wide experience spanning over 45 years in Banking, Financial Services and Technology Industry. His profound understanding of the digital security landscape has been instrumental in eMudhra's global expansion and innovation. ...
> A thought leader and author, Mr. Srinivasan penned "New Age Management Philosophy from Ancient Indian Wisdom," ...
> Under his visionary leadership, eMudhra has become a cornerstone in digital security, known for its pioneering solutions and steadfast adherence to global standards.
https://emudhra.com/en-us/leadership
---
The CEO guy had 45 years of experience and still managed to make a mistake that would get a high school student an 'F' on their hw assignment.
I can even hear this conversation happening: what? I need to open this America/Los_Angeles file just to convert a timestamp? What pretentious overengineering! I want a single-file executable with zero dependencies. Let me hard code the rules.
Isn't this what Go programs are to a certain extent?
Actually Go allows you to embed the tz database instead of forcing you to hardcode, so this issue probably won’t be very widespread.
We've had to rework part of our application and certificate use because of this.
Let's call it "Let's Decrypt!"
Now we are in a situation where we don't really have a practical and correct way to revoke certificates, but many, many things depend on pki.
No, this is not even remotely sensible.
An analogy would be shutting down neighborhood streets versus shutting down major highways in a state for a hurricane evacuation. You can't test the latter at scale.
Code paths and procedures that aren't exercised regularly are broken.
Even better is having a way to reoke keys and big players occasionally include revoked keys in trust chains and blast a warning if the revoked key is considered valid.
If you don't know if you can hot-swap your certs, you probably can't.
But at the end of the day if you're not prepared to revoke the trust of any CA you trust, it's a you problem
"no one was quite prepared for intermediate certificate revocation" is actually worse because as an intermediate CA, they obviously didn't meet the requirements to be a full root CA, so why wouldn't they be more likely to need revocation than a root? Honestly more negligent than being unable to revoke a root.
That doesn't mean it's cheap or easy, or that it's reasonable for the responsible party to brush off all the havoc they've caused.
This demonstrates how hard we are messed up in a CA revocation. But no need to rub it in like that, is there?
So they didn't even use their own certificates? :)
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.
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)
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.
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 1-byte private keys.
> 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".
https://emudhra.com/en/press-release/emudhra-to-exit-global-...
Popcorn recommended for the read!
they should tear down the entire barn
Is there some reputation left to salvage here that I'm not aware of? Who would trust them?
But more importantly they don't need to any such name change. For people who matter in India it is just some random incident which Anti-Indian entities are whining about.
The technical people will just install a certbot and use the default Let's Encrypt config.
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.
It looks like the halfsix has a problem. Is gird fine for now?
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.
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.
What a weak minded statement. Just admit you messed up and call it a day.
The statement can use whatever weasel words it likes, but the action pretty clearly says "we aren't mature enough as an organisation to handle this responsibility." Which would be quite the concern for me, if I were a customer for one of eMudhra's other product lines.
It raises the question why these CAs agree to participate on this forum and then complain about doing so.
Folks in India — especially the boomer class — are trepidated by how they're perceived over actual substance and quality of their work (exceptions exist, of course).
Edit: Sudhir Kakar's (an Indian psychoanalyst) work on Indian identity (The Inner World, Intimate Relations) helped me decode my own origin culture's internal logic. Highly recommend it for people of South Asian diaspora.
In martial arts the winner will often say "I got lucky" or "you almost had me" to allow the loser to save face, at least publicly, when in reality the skill gap is evident.
A bad loser tries to save face. A good winner helps them.
The company we're discussing is being a bad loser.
no grace if you use 4 as the private key for a trusted authority.
> Izzat (Bengali: ইজ্জত; Hindi: इज़्ज़त; Urdu: عزت, romanized: 'izzat, lit. 'honour') literally translated: "respect" is a concept of prestige, dignity, and social respect.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat
* Similar? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
Also, this is the response from official Indian Ministry of Electronics & IT:
…” However, some social media accounts are indulging in fear mongering about the impact of this incident.…”
Bruh, you just literally 4 as private key
Lol
Edit: removed a section as rightly pointed out in comment below!
“One of eMudhra’s certificate authority private keys is the number 4. Not a number that starts with 4, or the number 4 followed by a few hundred random digits, just, 4… Another one is 56, and another is 115. I know, because I recovered all of them from their public certificates on my laptop just now, and it took less than a second,” wrote Helme.
Security researcher Scott Helme was among those who recovered the keys. This is a hall-of-fame level fail.
No, their private key is 4. Moreover, you wouldn't see the literal number 4 because the PEM key file would have the cryptographic sections encoded in base64.
Just the sheer size and diversity of the Indian "boomer class" could put such generalizations in doubt?
> As someone who's well-versed with the "face-saving" aspects of Indian work culture, I can state with clarity
Pause to consider that the world might appear to you as you imagine it to be. That is, it might be holding up a mirror in to your own psyche.
People like you are the ones make the world place to live in
You joke, but this happened to my cousin.
As someone who's blood is tainted with teflon and microplastics same as you, I can state with clarity that attributing universal corporate tendencies to national work culture is completely in character for a Sagittarius.
You apparently don't understand Indians.
(I presume that's a typo.)
e.g. Japanese culture in many circumstances requires a company to rush to apologize for the smallest perceived (not even actual) fault
For a something this big they'd probably have execs making a visit to a certain forest.
Certainly can't speak for the rest of the world.
War crimes stuffs is a separate and a bit more nuanced issue. It's also not just the simple matter of admitting or denying it.
learn about Izzat and Jugaad in their "culture". That explains the problem itself, as well as the reaction ;)
I see this more as "we didn't know this was so complex and the juice no longer looks worth the squeeze."
I have to assume the fact this didn't get discovered suggests they weren't investing in trying to break their own crypto. A good takeaway for anyone else who wants to be in this space.
A unit test becoming prod data? That’s really all I’ve got and that’s pretty unforgivable.
Some people just follow a spec and don't stop to think what that spec is supposed to accomplish.
Human error was selecting the wrong output file and promoting it forward.
It's not at all the kind of thing you want to see in a reliable, secure, mature process... There shouldn't be a step where a human even makes a choice there.
And it's exactly the kind of thing most companies are doing, most of the time, more often than we would like.
An awful lot of the world runs on spit and bailing wire and things too easy to automate yet, and the parts that don't cost more.
Thousand line shell scripts that use expect to drive 30+ answers to a multi-choice interactive tui (that only works on one version of redhat from 2008 or something) is not so unusual, can totally understand how it happened. No excuses in that though.
Plug for a friends boardgame - which uses D4's as playing pieces:
But in all honesty there are serious questions to be asked about:
a) The initial approval process for ANY CA
b) The ongoing monitoring process for ANY CA
The fact this CA was based in India ultimately has nothing to do with it if we are being completely honest here.
Clearly there is a fundamental problem with the overarching approval and monitoring process which means it could have happened anywhere. This time it just happened to be India.
Secondly, in direct reference to the "far away company" comment India does have quite strict controls on both certain technical things (speaking generally here, not specifically in relation to certs ... e.g. use of sat phones). And in general it is quite difficult (read: almost impossible) to turn up in India and do business as an external company. So there is probably a genuine need for an Indian company CA since not every body can/wants to use Let's Encrypt or whatever.
Microsoft, in particular, had strong transparency around CA approval processes that were reasonable. It was weird.
Far away from the default country?
This is a sample on what it looks like during covid lockdown : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1728790
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?
https://security.googleblog.com/2014/07/maintaining-digital-...
If they key is distributed by DNS, then you need to secure DNS, e.g. with DNSSEC. Well, with DNSSEC the TLDs and root basically have the same status as CAs (although it does cut down the huge number of CAs that can issue certs).
Isn't the problem that anyone can/could issue end entity certificates with those certificates as "parent"?
Apparently they generated them like this: https://xkcd.com/221/
What does this mean from the press release? Were they only issuing other chained intermediates? Or did they never issue any ECC certificates from these at all, and everyone is paying the price?
I wonder if big roots with chained intermediates will now need to have serious pressure on their downstream intermediates to re-prove their need to exist. I know RHEL and Debian's strategy (if not others) was to pull the Comodo AAA Services root as well ...
IIRC the Comodo AAA Services root was already in the process of being retired, with its "trust bit" having been removed by Mozilla and Chrome last year. Nuking it completely should have been a no-op for end users.
The whole chaining & cross-signing song-and-dance will never go away completely. There's just no way around if if you want enrollment of a new CA to take less than a decade, or if you want CAs to be able to do any form of non-world-breaking key rotation. Intermediates signed by third-party roots are already treated with the same scrutiny as root certs, so they should have been fine...
But yes, this will undoubtedly result in even stricter verification. For example, some participants are already calling for mandating attestation that a key has been generated inside a HSM running the right config.
1. 59 million of those 60 million could be very short validity, duplicate enrollments from same private key/csr, etc. 2. I'm still not certain that that figure isn't including for example private roots/intermediates they've issued from.
That said they're a low volume (in terms of root/int) provider so I don't think the impact of them exiting will be great.
#1 Executive bonuses
#2 Shareholder value
...
...
--//--
...
...
#NaN customer trust
#NaN security
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.
it doesn't matter that they left the business, it matters that _they_ continue to be investigated
"Oh sorry, we erased the evidence because we no longer had use for it"
From everything that came out they seem terribly unqualified.
Analog
sure eMudhra needs to be investigated and confirmed that even a small part of their business hadn't been used to compromise (it doesn't matter that they left the business, it matters that the investigation continues)
but also we need to see how it is this even happened, who dropped the ball and approved the bad code/behavior to enter in the first place??
or is this a structural issue where we need to introduce more checks/balances (tests)
This is problem with Indian companies, their founder and management always try to hire cheap labor and penny pinch on everything. And, this is the result we see again and again.
Absolutely no way any OS or browser manufacturer forgives them and let's their certs validate anything in the future.
Or silently spin out a subsidiary under a new name who takes over the cert business, and redirect existing customers there for renewals.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c30 They're being asked some very pointed questions about why they encountered problems with the key generation process at the time but didn't properly investigate.
Don't these people pay any attention to politics?
First one I clicked on?
Really though, this is no different than people relying on accountancy firms in the rest of the world for "trust" and "security" as technology concepts. Accountancy firms have no business consulting on technology topics, and yet that is a major part of their business all over the world, because we've allowed "security" and "compliance" to become muddled concepts.
We have established he could at least count to 4 :)
this lets them exit this without public humiliation of getting made fun (and example of) in the mailing lists.
For example, node, java, and python all have vendored roots and don't check any CRLs.
Well, what about them? If you've got access to the private key, nothing is going to stop you from generating a cert violating CAA records - and it won't even be easy to detect! They are intended to protect against, say, someone hacking into your server, running ACME to get a cert, cleaning up their traces, and then intercepting your traffic for 90 days. CAA records assume the CA is trustworthy and following the rules.
My trust in those vetting the CAs is completely broken now.
You might have heard of DigiCert or IdenTrust, but what, exactly, makes them trustworthy, and why eMudhra wouldn't be considered trustworthy (a week ago)?
That’s sort of the problem the CA forum (badly) addresses. The consumers of the CAs are not specifically exposed to failures of the CA they choose.
One man's "little known company with no cybersecurity muscle" is another one's "sovereign certificate infrastructure."
~ Not a quote from the press release
Surely they should be investigated by the local regulator.
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/meity-forms-team-to-probe...
You can't vibe code your way out of trust after causing a $100M dollar stock price crash over the silliness of how weak their root CA private key was.
The reason we don't have DANE support in browsers is of course because Google decided not to implement it in Chrome, because (ultimately) the key lengths securing the root DNS server zones weren't large enough to suit them (at the time, 1024 bits):
https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html
And if Google wasn't going to do it, it didn't make sense for any other browser to do it either.
However, I believe the root zone keys are now longer, so I could (potentially) see Google implementing DANE in Chrome now, maybe with a Chrome-specific restriction of "TLSA records that have keys under 2048 bits in their chain of trust are ignored" (since the root zone keys are not the only keys in the chain and they want to eliminate 1024-bit RSA from Chrome). And if Google does it in Chrome, then everybody else has to do it too, so the situation flips.
ban LLM discovery of horrendous security practices because as it turns out security-thru-obscurity is being practiced as 'good enough' across the world , or actually enforce realistic and livable security practice ?
given the insistence on picking overblown and totally partisan poor choices lately, I presume the media will sit on the side of 'we'll just ban LLMs from checking the rest of our security apparatus for single digit keys' and charge 'Wayne' with terrorism statutes.' -- but hopefully i'm just being a jaded pessimist.