Title: eMudhra Pulls Trust From Eight More Intermediate CAs It Had Called Unaffected
Summary: eMudhra’s October key compromise has claimed eight more intermediate certificate authorities. Per the incident report the company posted on Mozilla’s bug tracker, a Python script written for an April 30, 2025 key ceremony — meant to wrap and unwrap keys in transit between the Utimaco HSMs that generated them and Crypto4A HSMs at the company’s US and EU sites — read each new private key out of the HSM into the ceremony computer’s memory. For the eight ECDSA intermediates that mattered in October, one line truncated the private value to its leading byte, yielding keys recoverable in seconds (The Hacker News worked them all out from public certificates; the smallest is 4); those eight were revoked with reason cACompromise on October 18 and Mozilla emergency-removed trust in emSign ECC Root CA - G3. The eight RSA intermediates now revoked went through the same read-back step the company had ruled out — on October 19 it wrote that “the RSA issuers went through a different path … and are therefore not impacted.” eMudhra now says it cannot positively demonstrate the key material was handled per its own CPS §6.2.6, and revoked the six TLS and two code-signing intermediates late last week with reason code cessationOfOperation rather than keyCompromise — a choice participants on the bug tracker have questioned. Its certificate list names 195 certificates from the revoked CAs (130 from EM DV TLS CA - G2C, 63 from EM OV TLS CA - G2C, 2 from the code-signing CA), 29 on the company’s own domains; all holders have been moved to new certificates, and the company reports no known misuse. The timeline tightens for anyone still on eMudhra chains: G1 issuance stops before November 16, Microsoft starts removing the ten remaining roots that day, Chrome and Firefox stop trusting G1 certificates issued after November 16, and Apple ends trust in all G1 certificates on November 30 — with macOS 27.2.1, 26.7.3 and 15.8.3 already stopping bundled curl and git from accepting the compromised TLS CA certificates. KPMG’s independent review is due December 4.
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