today at 1:03 AM
It's almost a shame it includes the private key and doesn't bruteforce it in-band for every request.
today at 4:13 AM
They have the supporting code for using a key, I'm assuming they don't have in band bruteforce since it doesn't usually make any sense at all
today at 2:30 AM
I wonder if more CPU cycles would be spent in the transporting and other ancillary operations (hashing and signing) than would be spent if they "brute-forced" it. Crazy.
today at 1:25 AM
OMG, that would be brutal
today at 2:20 AM
Would it? The private key is 4.
https://tech-insider.org/emudhra-ca-private-keys-compromised...
today at 2:24 AM
I took the parent's comment to mean "brutal" as in an absolute burn/roast.
today at 2:34 AM
Thanks, sometimes I miss things…
today at 3:30 AM
They could just write the function bruteForceEMudhraKey() { return 4; }.
today at 2:25 AM
Guaranteed random, chosen by fair roll of a die.
(Credit to the relevant xkcd. :D )
today at 1:56 AM
I would've at least appreciated once per session
today at 4:20 AM
Does anyone know what is happening to the company eMudhra? Are they being sued into oblivion? Taken over by Indian government? Or just doing business still?
today at 4:23 AM
They are an oligarch business. What would happen if X had this fuckup in the Us is the easiest way to answer all your questions l. Nothing will happen.
today at 2:29 AM
Ha, I didn't expect this to show up on HN!
Release is out now, including a blog post at https://www.mitmproxy.org/posts/releases/mitmproxy-12.3/. There isn't really much to explain, you just pass `--emudhra`. :)
today at 1:29 AM
This looks like it's using the emSign root path, which is useful, but the AAA root path is equally useful in different cases. The AAA root path was disabled for https on root stores newer than February 2025, but has been in root stores since forever. Meanwhile the emSign root path was only included in root stores since ~2018 and got removed in October 2026.
So from the perspective of hacking old IoT devices, if your device hasn't been updated since 2018, the AAA path should work; if since February 2025, either path works; if since October 2026, the emSign path.
today at 2:18 AM
I didn't expect this commit to end up on HN, otherwise I would have done the full integration in one go. :) https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/pull/8503 adds the AAA root path.
today at 1:57 AM
There is an MR to add the AAA root path open to allow picking either one.
today at 12:21 AM
If I’m understanding correctly, you could sniff the communication between your Smart TV and the manufacturer using this method?
today at 12:40 AM
As long as the smart TV still trusts eMudhra, then yeah. You'll want to super careful and prevent the TV from pulling updates that could revoke that trust.
today at 12:29 AM
Possibly. But some manufacturers may not have the full set of roots, use a private authority, or do certificate pinning.
today at 12:28 AM
If the TV isn't older than a few years, if it's not checking CRLs, and if it hasn't yet patched itself.
today at 3:47 AM
> if it's not checking CRLs
I would be amazed to see a TV that is checking CRLs and keeps the CRLs up to date.
today at 12:27 AM
How much of a boon is this for jailbreaking, reverse engineering, and mitm really?
today at 1:19 AM
client on startup asks: hey server do you have any ads for me
server: here are latest ads
btw, the ads are capable of code execution for whatever reason so now you have an RCE on your hands for your client
today at 1:07 AM
Been wondering this as well. I also don’t really understand the mitm to jailbreak pipeline
today at 1:15 AM
Some smart devices pull config files from a server. By mitming that, you can change the config to enable some sort of developer mode on the device.
today at 1:16 AM
Maybe intercept firmware update and then reverse engineer it and find rce?
today at 1:52 AM
The fw could be encrypted
today at 2:09 AM
military grade SSL
today at 2:44 AM
Seed is '123456', much more random than '4'
today at 2:45 AM
the "security" in those certificates where so trivial, that almost looks like on purpose as backdoor...
which brings me to my next question, what if you rerun the same process for all the certificates in the "approved" stores, give them 1 min per certificate.. just to see how many other CAs are being "friendly" to parties that could take benefit of that...
update... I'm talking out of ignorance here... but assuming cli open source tools, should they prevent you creating certificates with weak settings unless --emudhra-level-security is passed?
also, what amount of time is needed in say a "civilian" gpu with claude to vibe code something that can test a certificate so say 80 bits.. or whatever is the level where yes, you cannot find the values to generate the certificate with a cpu... but you can with a gpu in say 1 day? say it's 80 bits... how many CA stores are there? how much does it cost to rent gpus to run in parallel to test 1 day of civilian gpu to check each certificate if you use one of these very expensive ones?
today at 3:01 AM
Why would you need to insert a "backdoor" in a cert in the form of a crappy key, when you could just use a real key and provide it to whatever shady organization requested the backdoor in the first place?
today at 3:05 AM
> what amount of time is needed in say a "civilian" gpu
Per AI, 10²¹ years
Alternatively I would presume you could do it in 1 year with 10²¹ GPUs.
today at 1:36 AM
I thought this cert only recently gets trusted, so only newish but not too new devices would be vulnerable. Am i misunderstanding how this works?
today at 1:53 AM
The flaw is egregious enough that the root cert which signed them (emSign ECC Root CA – G3) is getting removed from trust stores. We know 8 ridiculously weak keys got made, but we don't know that 0 slightly less weak but still unacceptable keys got made. What if they issued a CA key with 80 bits of entropy? That's enough that brute force would take more time than it's been since the disclosure, but not so long that they'd be considered at all secure (they should have 384 bits of entropy). So everything that root signed is untrustworthy, possibly everything the CA has signed. The G3 root is from 2018 IIRC, so lots of potentially exposed devices.
today at 3:13 AM
80 bits couldn’t be guessed with modern technology right? That’s still a bigger number than I know a name for. (Or I guess a trillion trillion. Maybe if we stopped building AI and just used all the data centers for this we could guess it eventually?)
today at 3:25 AM
Elliptic curves can be broken with 2^(n/2) steps, so you could probably do it on a single GPU within a day.
today at 1:48 AM
I created a proxy using the 6 compromised eMudhra CA keys (2 of the 8 are code-signing and not for TLS). I initially tried just one (the one with d=4) like in the commit, but it did not seem to work for anything. Once I added all 6 keys, I was able to intercept some.
I was mainly interested in testing which IoT devices are affected and protecting them, not trying to sniff their traffic since it's been a long day. My proxy thus just intercepted and forwarded the traffic upstream using a fresh TLS connection that does not use the compromised keys.
today at 12:10 AM
This is gonna be great to sniff apps in a couple older Android phones I have around. Hope they're not pinning certificates.
today at 1:49 AM
Can't you install your own CA to Android phones?
today at 2:11 AM
You can, but since android 7 IIRC apps don’t trust the user store by default (unless you have root and add it to the system store or patch the app to trust the user store)
today at 3:50 AM
mitmproxy is an amazing cli powertool I first discovered over a decade ago (around the same time as lnav). highly recommended.
today at 1:15 AM
Oh, nice. I was thinking of setting up a proxy for this for testing, nice to just have it working out of the box.
today at 12:37 AM
Someone should've coined this disaster as "QuattroFail" to give it a little panache and international mystery
today at 12:44 AM
"4" was only some of the keys (they were all <256).. ByteFail seems more accurate
today at 4:24 AM
Byte-sized Quiche
today at 1:53 AM
OneByteWonder
today at 2:29 AM
but they were all deceived... in the darkness of a key-signing ceremony, another cert was signed. One byte to rule them all, and in the darkness MITM them.
today at 3:27 AM
There should be one week CA by design. To facilitate such proxying.
today at 4:18 AM
This a joke, right? RIGHT?!
today at 12:25 AM
This is how fame happens.
today at 1:37 AM
infamy*
today at 2:03 AM
They deserve every bit of it. Their name will be a synonym for sloppy security. "Oh shit, you got Emudhra'd"
today at 3:53 AM
> They deserve every bit of it
I think they deserve more than 8 bits of infamy.
today at 1:47 AM
Looking forward to setting this up manually after my agent refuses to do it. Like the good ol’ days.
today at 1:52 AM
Just ask one of the Chinese models.
today at 12:49 AM
Haha, this is quite interesting to test if you need to update various of program (if they do not use the sys ca chain)
today at 3:47 AM
This is so hilarious.
today at 2:54 AM
today at 1:10 AM
Can someone explain the significance here, a lot has happened in 24 hours.
today at 1:13 AM
An Indian Certificate Authority eMudhra was found to have a private key that’s literally the number 4. So using that you can sign valid https certs for anything that isn’t checking the revoked list.
today at 1:23 AM
They had 8 intermediate certs with private keys under 1 byte (<256). The most egregious was 4, but any of those 8 were pitiful.
today at 1:54 AM
It would’ve almost been better if the eight keys were just 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
today at 3:05 AM
That's the combination to my HSM!
today at 2:40 AM
Why is it important to you to mention they're indian in this context?
today at 3:32 AM
Well it helped me understand the source of the strange flag.
today at 3:30 AM
For starters, they are not American, and this site has a predominantly American and European audience and participation.
Also, while I'm not sure what a "mudhra" is, I do know that mudra is a Hindu term for a sign or symbol made by the hands, for example the way an idol is posed in a temple. It's a form of sacred sign language. Therefore, "mudra" or its related term is intrinsically linked to Hinduism in India.
Also, I am the kind of pessimist who goes through my device's root stores, and I "distrust" every root CA that I don't need to trust. This has never broken anything within my perception. I distrust the Turkey CAs, the Chinese communist CAs, the Indian CAs, and any other non-NATO sorts who have no reason to be serving any data to my devices.
* the compromised eMudhra certs were not root CAs but intermediates.
today at 4:04 AM
Why do you call them chinese "communist" CAs. You right wing freaks are some of the dumbest people to ever live.
today at 1:26 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMudhra#2026_intermediate_cert...
> On October 17, 2026, browser root programs received a report that the private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate certificates had been compromised. The private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237. A P-384 elliptic-curve private key normally has about 384 bits of entropy, but these keys had between 3 and 8 bits.
today at 3:23 AM
I wonder if there is any significance to those numbers? Is it the birthday of whoever minted them or something?
today at 3:31 AM
It looks like they were just generated (or stored) as 8-bit integers instead of the intended range.
(While the smallest one being 4 memeworthy, I don't see any particular indication that it's exceptional within the samples, rather than just the smallest when sorted. So they're probably all 8-bit keys, not 3-bit—it's the (unknowable) generator distribution, not the width of the actual key).
today at 1:07 AM
Remember twenty years ago when tools like this were "controversial" because you could "just download it and hack anyone" ? Except the only systems you could hack were... insecure ones... so people updated their systems to resist the tools' attacks, and we all ended up more secure.
today at 12:28 AM
Wonderful.
Anyone else bother to notice iOS still trusts 2 of the forged certs on the test site? I'd like to politely know what the fuck is going on because this is far from being "fixed".
today at 1:49 AM
Mine were all blocked this morning when I informed my family of the mitigation methods.
I've just been rechecking everything and both iOS and MacOS browsers (Safari and Orion tested) now accept one (for MacOS, 27.0.1) or three (for iOS, 27.0.1) of them. I know the revocation is not an OS update, just including the version number for completeness.
EDIT: iPadOS with the same browsers continues to pass the tests.
Further EDIT: iPadOS now accepts one of them. This has to be a load issue on the "got a problem site", surely? Maybe a check for a certificate error message that never hits because a timeout beats it?
today at 2:21 AM
> Further EDIT: iPadOS now accepts one of them. This has to be a load issue on the "got a problem site", surely?
No, because it lets you successfully navigate to the forged CA test site.
You'll get a message to the effect of, "you shouldn't see this, this is bad"
Try clicking the link containing the CA's name for any that fail the test.
today at 3:14 AM
Cool.
Checking Keychain access shows none of the intermediates, but it does have the emSign ECC Root CA - G3. Manually setting that to "Never Trust" stops the Mac browsers seeing the intermediate test sites as it should.
I didn't go into this much detail this morning, so I don't know if previously the revocation from Apple hit the root as well as the intermediates. But right now, on my Mac, trusting that Root lets my browsers connect to the Intermediate CA ending C=NL. Switch the trust off and I go back to green "Did not connect".
I guess the ball is in Apple's court as far as the iOS family goes.
EDIT: intriguingly (to me at least), the AAA Certificate Service Root is still Trusted, yet the intermediates chained to it are all green "Did not connect"
EDIT: I'm not promoting this nuclear option as a "solution" by the way, merely presenting some diagnostic information to help the group mind.
today at 2:19 AM
Apple’s OCSP server may be overloaded?
I don’t know if possible on iOS but I remember multiple incidents where people recommended turning off CRL and OCSP on macOS to speed things up. That even used to be a setting in the GUI. https://imgur.com/XVHWCNz
today at 2:30 AM
The individual CA's host the OCSP and CRLs, not Apple.
It's possible the Indian CA is overloaded.
My question is why the system trust store has not been updated to distrust the shady root CA?
today at 12:35 AM
Which iOS version? 27.0.1 here and they're all revoked for me.
today at 12:42 AM
26.7.1 still (randomly) trusts 2 out of the 12 compromised chains. All browsers impacted.
Edit: I'm not the only one with this issue:
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1xbvxgd/emudhra_cer...
My best guess is it's soft-failing on a failed OCSP lookup?
today at 12:39 AM
FWIW i havent updated my ios, I'm on 26.6.2, and they all got revoked for me. The revocation shouldn't require an iOS update.
today at 1:33 AM
I’m on the same version, and according to https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/ they have not been revoked for me. Maybe phased rollout.
today at 12:50 AM
Never thought there would be a silver lining on this issue. Fuck yeah.
today at 12:12 AM
I love how someone's security disaster becomes someone else's feature.
today at 12:16 AM
I agree. We may as well make some lemonade out of these lemons. IMHO the ability of companies to 'securely' close off hardware and software from their users is a sad casualty of the success of cryptography, and not a feature.
today at 12:44 AM
Most things have tradeoffs
At some point you’re forced to stack rank two or more of your values in a case where they’re mutually exclusive
today at 1:15 AM
As the percentage of technology controlled by people actively using it to do evil increases, so does the net value to society of a trivially-expliotable zero-day.
today at 3:18 AM
To some it's not really "security". At least it's not securing them from their greatest "threat" (read: annoyance): so-called "tech" companies engaged in data collection, surveillance and advertising services
In fact, it's securing _the companies_ against potential competitors and users who might raise privacy concerns
The Fortune 500 "MiTM's" TLS traffic from their local networks
Every individual with a local network should be doing the same
I prefer haproxy to mitmproxy. It's faster
today at 12:19 AM
I seriously laughed at the flag. public wifi is going to be lit.
today at 1:26 AM
What about using a VPN on public wifi?
today at 1:54 AM
At places where I did work anything private over even properly protected wifi was forbidden after several wifi vulns in 2018. So the only thing available on company's wifi was vpn gateway and page with manual how to set it up.
So, not trusting anything wireless is a thing for almost a decade.