Yet another Hacker News

eMudhra ignored Mozilla Root investigation deadline; blames social media

130 points IcePenguin 1 hour ago 56 comments

IcePenguin 1 hour ago | parent

eMudhra's recent response regarding their Intermediate CA private key compromise, citing social media activity and investor relations as blockers to technical investigation and analysis: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c39

> "There are a lot of questions here. As most of you can imagine, we have been subject to intense social media scrutiny and analysis by investors/customers over the last few days and it has made doing any meaningful analysis of the event pretty much impossible."

Mozilla Root Program's update, stating that eMudhra has not responded to investigatory questions within deadlines (and had provided an extension): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c42

> "The Mozilla Root Program sent the attached questions to eMudhra on the 20th October at 20:31 UTC. eMudhra was asked to provide an initial response within 24 hours. After the deadline passed on October 21st, eMudhra asked for a further 24 hours to respond. As of the time of writing on Friday 23rd, Mozilla has not received a response to these questions."

jmspring 41 minutes ago | parent

I hadn't heard of this Intermidate CA provider. I guess I've been a bit lax on keeping myself updated in the PKI space. That said, given the country it is based, it doesn't surprise me about the general lack of quality and seriousness about what they did and how it's been exposed.

I may get downvotes, but this just screams amateur hour.

dsr_ 32 minutes ago | parent

The downvote is for generalizing to a country.

moi2388 27 minutes ago | parent

If you ever dealt with indian software companies you would also know it to be an accurate statement, however

rei_xd 18 minutes ago | parent

unironically yes

15155 22 minutes ago | parent

Is it possible to make a broadly-accurate generalization about work ethic in a given country? (There are no Foxconn-style suicide nets in the United States that I am aware of - so perhaps?)

Do some countries possibly value quality or responsibility as a desirable property more than others at a cultural level? (Is "German Engineering" a real thing?)

Why do 419-style scams seem to emanate from a few specific countries? Why is piracy on the high seas more prevalent in Somalia than the United Kingdom?

lukan 10 minutes ago | parent

"Is it possible to make a broadly-accurate generalization about work ethic in a given country? "

It is, but those generalisations are usually debatable and will then lead to nationalistic debates that are allmost always flame war style, with people shouting over each other who is from the worst nation. Which is why many flag anything, that smells like leading towards this.

VirusNewbie 6 minutes ago | parent

Is it work ethic or is it nepotism/corruption?

I mean if I'm going to make really large generalizations about Software Engineering talent by country, Swiss people are the absolute bottom of the barrel maybe followed by the cheap outsourcing countries next, but ymmv.

I'm also sure i've worked with a lot more very good Indian engineers than German engineers here in America, but that might have more to do with who immigrates here.

icedchai 7 minutes ago | parent

It is poor form. But if you've ever worked with one of the WITCH companies, these statements come as no surprise.

paaloeye 14 minutes ago | parent

Somewhat liberal use of the verb "may"

patjensen 1 hour ago | parent

Revoked.

IcePenguin 1 hour ago | parent

Previous HN discussions:

eMudhra intermediate CA compromise

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166579

1271 points | galadran | 3 days ago | 504 comments

Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177916

935 points | hkc | 2 days ago | 460 comments

eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50195110

1111 points | bo0tzz | 1 day ago | 713 comments

ForHackernews 1 hour ago | parent

This seems like a fair response to me:

> There are a lot of questions here. As most of you can imagine, we have been subject to intense social media scrutiny and analysis by investors/customers over the last few days and it has made doing any meaningful analysis of the event pretty much impossible. The event happened on April 30 2025 and was done by set of people who have worked in the PKI industry for several years and worked with us for a while. There is a lot of digging we need to do to understand the circumstances, why, what, how to share a meaningful report that can hopefully benefit the community. I do not know why some community members think we wont be getting back on this bug. When we signed up for the browser program trust, we also signed up for disclosure obligations to the community which we will uphold.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c39

ETA- HN rate-limiting won't let me reply, but to the commenter asking how all the pressure could delay a sober analysis:

I've never been involved with a mess like this, but I can well imagine it's difficult to convene the necessary people for a dispassionate RCA when your bosses are furious and investors are screaming for scapegoats to fire.

wolvoleo 1 hour ago | parent

No it does not. How does social media upheaval make internal analysis impossible?

thumbsup-_- 55 minutes ago | parent

because they are more interested in saving the image on social media than doing the right thing.

ghostbrainalpha 45 minutes ago | parent

I was involved in the an incident like this, and the intense pressure for public immediate action led to the (firing or resignation) of multiple people who were actually needed for the investigation.

Something that could have been fully analyzed with those people in a couple weeks ending up taking two years with an independent outside auditor.

The independent auditor would have been needed either way, but if we gave the original crew the opportunity to respond, THEN fired them, the outside auditor could have just verified the story much more quickly.

mcmcmc 41 minutes ago | parent

> the intense pressure for public immediate action led to the (firing or resignation) of multiple people who were actually needed for the investigation.

That just sounds like a management failure. You don’t actually have to cave.

bauruine 27 minutes ago | parent

You where involved in the biggest fuckup by orders of magnitude your whole industry ever did in it's existance? I'm interested to hear the story.

ForHackernews 24 minutes ago | parent

C'mon now, this isn't even the biggest IT disaster this week.

bauruine 20 minutes ago | parent

Im talking about the CA industry. Maybe industry is the wrong word?

InsidiousWombat 52 minutes ago | parent

If some social media nonsense makes it hard for you to do internal investigation on the problem that shows that you're organisationally incompetent in addition to whatever else in the process failed.

bauruine 50 minutes ago | parent

Those are just more reasons to remove every cert they ever touched.

roblabla 48 minutes ago | parent

> I've never been involved with a mess like this, but I can well imagine it's difficult to convene the necessary people for a dispassionate RCA when your bosses are furious and investors are screaming for scapegoats to fire.

In any sane business, the people handling the screaming investors are different from the people handling the social media mess, and they are also different from the people doing the RCA.

That said, given the mess, I wouldn't be surprised if eMudhra only had one employee responsible for all those jobs...

criddell 42 minutes ago | parent

That's what managers are for. They shield the people doing the work from all the external distractions.

altairprime 28 minutes ago | parent

> I can well imagine it's difficult to convene the necessary people for a dispassionate RCA when your bosses are furious and investors are screaming for scapegoats to fire.

Such a business will not be long operating a CA, then: these sorts of requests are common and CA operations are done openly in public with all accidents openly admitted in plain view. If management can’t deliver an environment that prioritizes compliance over rage and blame, then termination of CA acceptance for the company they manage with such irrationality is a successful outcome for the process. I respect that there may be opposing corporate and/or cultural pressures, and I imagine that’s why they’re voluntarily exiting the CA business, but they’re at risk of having all issuances distrusted retroactively if they think that gives them the leeway to reply late.

andor 19 minutes ago | parent

Some of these questions shouldn't be that difficult to answer, and they were asked to provide an initial response anyways.

For example, further up in the bug tracker, they stated that there was an error in a script. If they were able to find an error, why can't they provide the script?

skeledrew 51 minutes ago | parent

If you can't take the heat...

jdiff 7 minutes ago | parent

They are already attempting to flee the kitchen as quickly as they can, unfortunately the rest of the planet that's still in the kitchen isn't keen on letting them escape the grease fire they started.

Plasmoid 36 minutes ago | parent

What responsibility does the CA that signed eMudhra's intermediate cert bear here?

IcePenguin 30 minutes ago | parent

There may be some scrutiny of Sectigo's part in this, however, they did revoke the cross-signed certs within 24 hours of acknowledging the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c13

"Sectigo has completed the revocation of the affected cross-signed CA Certificates. A new CRL and OCSP responses have been published and are making their way to our CDN edge nodes right now.

We will continue monitoring and evaluating this bug for further updates from Emudhra."

spockz 16 minutes ago | parent

Yes that if reactive. But I think GP meant what their responsibility in this is given that they signed and thereby vouched for an intermediate ca that now has become untrustworthy.

tamimio 34 minutes ago | parent

When an engineer (or engineering firm) found that it caused a bridge collapse due to negligence, they are taken accountable, sometimes even prison times if harm or death happened. We rarely see the same in tech world for some reason, there’s still this green pass and the idea that tech are auxiliary and all its mistakes are just reset a password. That company should be accountable, the damage is far from over as these certs that made by stupid people could be anywhere from IoT to critical infrastructure.

ForHackernews 26 minutes ago | parent

No one at OpenAI, Anthropic or Google will be held accountable for their various felony bots[0], Facebook encouraged an actual genocide[1], but HN commenters are baying for blood of some random Indian contracting firm that royally goofed up their SSL certs.

[0] https://www.felonybench.com/

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

bob1029 12 minutes ago | parent

Accountability is rarely something that a person or organization will spontaneously adopt of their own free will. It generally has to be forced from the outside by way of additional consequences.

Right now, it would appear that the strongest external consequences for fucking up a CA are strongly-worded posts in a web forum. I would hesitate to call the wind-down of a business unit a "consequence" in this context because it's the default outcome. Everyone was already playing that game. We need an additional layer of pressure to encourage good behavior.

Vaushite 6 minutes ago | parent

No, it's not limited to strongly worded posts. The external consequences are usually immediate bankruptcy of the CA after the investigation concludes. An untrusted CA has absolutely no business model whatsoever, and may have to refund its former customers.

Vaushite 7 minutes ago | parent

That's because a bridge didn't collapse.

jwineinger 28 minutes ago | parent

Do I, as a US-based English speaking person, need to have CAs from India and other places trusted by default in my browsers/devices? My gut says no and it just represents unnecessary risk, but I'm also not fully aware of how interleaved cert issuers are with cross signing and such.

tptacek 26 minutes ago | parent

eMudhra is (was?) a global CA and had subsidiaries serving the US market. Your browser also doesn't have a nationalist configuration; the same browser serves people all over the world.

The problem isn't foreign companies; it's bad CAs.

seki285 16 minutes ago | parent

No, the problem is foreign companies. Foreign nations have interests and as a US citizen I want to only trust other US citizens with my security, so should any other citizen anywhere else e.g. India can rely on India.

Vaushite 8 minutes ago | parent

And if you want to visit an Indian website, your browser should say "no! US websites only!"

whynotmaybe 5 minutes ago | parent

And what about when you, as a US citizen, are in India?

cvhc 5 minutes ago | parent

Millions of non-US citizens (foreign workers in the country and outsource workers) build American software. Too bad :doge:

qurren 24 minutes ago | parent

Until some website of some service you're using embeds an Indian-sourced JavaScript required for its support chat and you're unable to get a refund on a defective product you purchased.

Or worse, you were billed incorrectly by some US-based service, their support chat loads Indian assets, and they threaten to hit your credit score and send debt collectors after you if you don't pay up.

paaloeye 17 minutes ago | parent

Very bad argument. WebPKI and the internet are the global infrastructure. For the sake of argument, what unnecessary risk do you have in mind?

maxnoe 13 minutes ago | parent

Many US institutions seem to have used eMudhra as a cert provider, including Cornell, and the U of Michigan, Maryland and Chicago.

Check InCommon Certificate Service.

throwaway7356 11 minutes ago | parent

If you use the internet, yes.

If you want only to connect to the US net, stop connecting to the internet and use a US browser instead of a web browser.

Tomdarkness 19 minutes ago | parent

What kind of leverage do these browser CA programs have with eMudhra given they are no longer issuing TLS certificates?

If eMudhra just don't comply with Mozilla/Chrome, is there anything they can actually do?

bradfa 17 minutes ago | parent

The browsers could kick ALL their keys out and break all of eMudhra's customers websites. Those customers could sue.

bradfa 18 minutes ago | parent

Many HSMs do not force you to use unique labels for keys. So it's somewhat understandable if a human mixed up some keys during a non-standard or deviated process. This doesn't explain how so many different keys were "generated" so poorly or why no one cared about mismatched signatures.

And the discussion mentioning wrap/unwrap testing kind of feeds directly into the fear that either:

1. These weak keys were created outside the HSM and then imported.

2. These weak keys were meant to be the wrap keys somehow. Like, if they hadn't paid for some of the wrap/unwrap features on one of their HSMs and so were using easy-for-humans keys to handle the wrap/unwrap operations so they could more easily move keys between HSMs.

baud147258 5 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

nraynaud 15 minutes ago | parent

I have to say that if one of the RSA public keys was really 4, I have to tip my hat, stumbling on a perfect square of an even number, that’s really a score.