eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business After Eight Weak Keys

eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight dangerously weak intermediate TLS credentials, has announced that it will leave the global SSL/TLS certificate business.

The flawed credentials allowed anyone to create trusted certificates for websites and email servers. One of the affected certificates had only four private encryption keys.

eMudhra cites rising compliance costs and free TLS certificates

Mr. V. Srinivasan, chairman of India-based eMudhra Limited, said the company’s global SSL/TLS business generates only 1% of its revenue. He also cited the increased cost and complexity of compliance requirements, along with competition from organizations that offer TLS certificates for free.

“Add to that the increased costs and complexity of compliance requirements, and your business is only generating 1% of its revenue,” Srinivasan said in the company’s announcement.

eMudhra says incident scrutiny was disproportionate

“However, the level of social media escalation surrounding this incident has brought scrutiny out of proportion to the place of SSL/TLS in our business,” the company said in Thursday’s post.

“In light of this and after detailed consideration, our board of directors has concluded that exiting Global SSL/TLS is the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders.”

Researchers cracked the weak TLS keys in milliseconds

The announcement came two days after researchers revealed that eMudhra had issued eight certificates with private keys so weak that they could be discovered almost instantly. Anyone willing to spend the time—measured in milliseconds—could decrypt the keys and use them to generate TLS certificates trusted by major browsers and many email servers, IoT devices, Docker containers, forgotten Linux machines, and unmaintained command-line tools that distribute their own copies of root certificates.

The certificates used 3- to 8-bit private keys

The NIST P-384 elliptic-curve cryptography private keys used for these certificates are expected to contain approximately 384 bits of entropy. However, the eight compromised certificates had key sizes ranging from just 3 to 8 bits.

A 384-bit key has approximately 2³⁸⁴ possible values—a number with 116 digits. By comparison, the most powerful of the defective keys had a maximum value of only 256. The private-key values were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237.