eMudhra Quits Global SSL/TLS Certificates After One Incident Draws Outsized Scrutiny
eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business
eMudhra's board voted to withdraw from the global SSL/TLS certificate business, a line that brings in roughly 1% of revenue. Chairman V. Srinivasan said the affected CAs were revoked within 14 hours of discovery, no end-entity certificates were issued and no data was breached, yet social media attention exceeded the unit's actual weight. Rising data sovereignty rules, growing complexity and free certificates from large players also eroded returns. Roots stay live through a free replacement transition.
For many certifying authorities, SSL/TLS is the whole business. For eMudhra it is one part of a much broader digital solutions portfolio.
- rdtsc
> 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.
- Toutouxc
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?
- ieie3366
Related: the absolutely brutal question battery the Chrome team publicly submitted to eMudhra
- luispa
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
4
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
- rahimnathwani
"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.
- moribvndvs
> 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?
- nayuki
> 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...
- Arbortheus
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...
- b3lvedere
"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? :)
- trimbo
> 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.