In the old days a king would "sign" his proclamations by pressing his "unforgeable" signet into a wax seal. This proved the authenticity of the proclamation.

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.

I just explained what it actually is. I said "you know how you go to a website HTTPS and it's secure? Well Apple chose a couple of trusted parties that your phone inherently trusts, and those people approve a few thousand intermediate companies who do the day-to-day certificate work for end websites. One of those intermediates, rather than choosing a 200-digit random number, chose 4, no not four-digits, the number 4". And then we could laugh at some of the memes.

How about, someone is selling a secure box of some sort, and their factory starts putting glitter nail polish over the screws that hold it together, as is sometimes done for security reasons.

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!”

Everyone in your neighborhood knows your address, but someone discovered two days ago that they can get into your house by sticking a 4" oblong piece of paper into the keyhole. They put it on blast on Facebook, so now everyone in the whole planet is trying to break into your house.

A car manufacturer that reused the same car key for every car.

we could stick with the metaphor of keys. The modern web requires fancy ones capable of hundreds of notches. The company in question basically skipped the step of notches and just used the blank key

keep it simple. They promised a door key with 10 grooves cut in it, but instead they gave you a door key with 1 groove cut in it.

And when that clicks, extend the metaphor, literally, to a key with ~384 grooves.

>I can't come up with a metaphor or parable that's even remotely as ridiculous as what they've done

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.

They put a lot of effort into building a very secure safe, thick steel walls, can survive a fire forever, too heavy to move.

Then they locked it with the key you find on a chew toy for a baby.

Low quality tech company cuts corners seems pretty on point

concrete manufacture occasionally builds houses.

house collapses and people get injured.

concrete manufacture says we no longer build houses cause it’s too small of a business.

That's INSANE

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.

You can't do that because an RSA private key contains two numbers - the modulus and the exponent. Even better, an RSA private key usually has the modulus stored as its two factors rather than their product.

Also note that using small numbers like 65537 for RSA public exponents is common practice.

-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- MIG2AgEAMBAGByqGSM49AgEGBSuBBAAiBIGeMIGbAgEBBDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAShZANiAAQTglHNUqyS mMHIqtl3Mh3rl+cJvQtMoKylXcitUdz8nRWJoVl+OlEg4e/WMcY+GDXKyuKYaaYu FjHoooGBq1ZhbcRdkYq8CfOrDmPPeSqk3O1zh743u6VpVJ8cArJw7Wc= -----END PRIVATE KEY-----

The key needs to mention which curve it is using.

BEGIN EC PRIVATE KEY, surely?

Various Indian regulations (particularly around commerce and banking) require you to use India companies for solutions like the above. It gets worse when companies are "steered" by a regulator/compliance person who has a bias for a specific solutions provider.

Almost all browsers require certificates be recorded in Certificate Transparency logs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency#Manda...>. Since those logs are empty in this instance, you can state that no one used a forged certificate with a mainstream browser, which is the most obvious (and desirable) attack type.

Well, none came out of the Certificate Authority.

They just didn't mention that now anyone can be their own Certificate Authority.

You can also monitor if they show up in certificate transparency logs. Which won't catch all fraudulently issued certs, but might show up some, especially if it's being widely abused.

If you go by the timelines here - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449

It was ~15hrs 30 minutes to first revocation

4 would've been far more diligent.

no

Yes, but in the end that's not their fault, and in a sense it's good that this happened. It was well understood from the invention of security certificates that private keys might leak and certificates will need to be revoked. Systems that were not designed with this in mind should never have been deployed, and should now be decommissioned and replaced.

It might even be sensible to intentionally revoke a small number of certificates every month, to make sure nobody is complacent.

It rages me as well. Some random attacker could have MITM attack any https website without being noticed by anyone(including eMudhra), surely it won't contribute any to their revenue!

Part of it is on everyone else for not actually testing they key strength.

I mean, yeah I get your point but also if these pieces of the stack weren't prepared to deal with a compromised CA, then they were also at least a little bit negligent. There's always a chance this is going to happen. There's a chance it could happen and there not be any negligence or incompetence on the part of the CA

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

Do you think they left because they figure they’d never get enough trust back to make it worth trying?

“Trust, Liberated”

Why would they? They weren't secure! ;)

It's more like they tore down the entire barn.

5

Immediately and totally exiting the domain is about as close to admit you messed up and call it a day as you'll ever get from a modern company.

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.

I do agree it is out of proportion, they deserve a lot more amplification

DigiCert threatened legal action against companies that asked them embarrassing questions after they had to revoke certificates due to a bug.[1]

It raises the question why these CAs agree to participate on this forum and then complain about doing so.

1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1950144

> admit you messed up

You apparently don't understand Indians.

Culturally, that reply makes perfect sense.

e.g. Japanese culture in many circumstances requires a company to rush to apologize for the smallest perceived (not even actual) fault

> Just admit you messed up and call it a day.

learn about Izzat and Jugaad in their "culture". That explains the problem itself, as well as the reaction ;)

"We didn't care about that part of our business anyways!" And the outcome clearly shows that.

Plus „scrutiny“ - a company is a trust line of business shouldn’t be afraid of scrutiny

Probably just a botched translation though

To admit having messed up they would need to include the full private key in the post, which they seem to have decided is still more embarrassing than not including it.

The key was enough of a statement of TLS's place in their business. No new information here.

What I hear is that he is saying that the SSL/TLS business is only a small part of their overall business and that they can close that part down as a result of the loss of reputation for that this has rendered.

While I admit their explanation is questionable, they did admit they messed up.

I see this more as "we didn't know this was so complex and the juice no longer looks worth the squeeze."

Jesus H Christ these guys had literally the number 4 as their secret and they call telling them they're incompetent an "out of proportion" reaction?

The gall to write that after using the integer 4 as a private key.

There must be an uncountable number (>237) of social media posts about them by now.

We are high caste.

"We've been caught out showing that we didn't know what we were doing. And we think people sharing that is disproportionate"

A weak minded action doesnt produce a win for all parties involved. In fact I applaud their bravery.

Oh wow. The audacity to gaslight!

Clearly you never had a manager from India, otherwise you’d know this is standard protocol.

How does a client know what public key to expect for a given domain, then?

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).

> There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA’s.

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 ...

# of issued leaf certs isn't a great indicator of propagation, user-impact, revenue etc.

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.

That's virtually all businesses.

#1 Executive bonuses

#2 Shareholder value

...

...

--//--

...

...

#NaN customer trust

#NaN security

Guessing they started with 1 and have worked their at up to 4

Web PKI doesn't work like you think it does. I can use eMudhra's private keys to forge a cert for your website. You don't have a choice in this.

Worse yet, why is that CA even part of the Root CAs shipped on all the modern devices?

My trust in those vetting the CAs is completely broken now.

You might have heard of this "sovereignty" movement: sovereign OS, sovereign cloud, sovereign AI?

One man's "little known company with no cybersecurity muscle" is another one's "sovereign certificate infrastructure."

It mostly does not matter. They don’t have your private key, and EVERY trusted CA can miss-issue in your name, regardless of who you pick.

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.

> Kaushik holds a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering (member of Tau Beta Pi) and a Master's in Computer Engineering with a focus on Networking

First one I clicked on?

True, but the founder's two sons are at the top of the company, so mission was accomplished regardless.

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.

Yes they didn't close down the business, it was already gone. There's not a business called "selling certs that aren't accepted by any browser or OS". That's not a product.

Absolutely no way any OS or browser manufacturer forgives them and let's their certs validate anything in the future.

Sure there was - rebrand and change names, maybe once or twice until the public loses interest to keep talking about it.

Or silently spin out a subsidiary under a new name who takes over the cert business, and redirect existing customers there for renewals.

That presumably depends on your tolerance for bureaucracy and pain.

LLMs had nothing to do with this.