eMudhra Limited, a certificate authority based in India, announced it would cease operations in the TLS certificate business following disclosure of a significant security incident. The company’s chairman, V. Srinivasan, cited increasing compliance costs, minimal revenue contribution at roughly 1 percent of total business, and competition from free certificate providers as factors in the decision. The company also noted that the extensive media coverage and public scrutiny surrounding the incident influenced the board’s conclusion to withdraw from the market.
Two days before the announcement, security researchers revealed that eMudhra had issued eight intermediate TLS certificates containing critically defective private keys. The private keys, which should have contained approximately 384 bits of entropy according to NIST standards for P-384 elliptic curve cryptography, instead ranged from just 3 to 8 bits. The weakest keys had values of 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237, making them trivial to discover and crack. This vulnerability meant that unauthorized parties could generate TLS certificates trusted by major web browsers and countless other systems including email servers, IoT devices, Docker containers, and various computing tools.
eMudhra attributed the failure to defects that occurred during a key generation ceremony held on April 30, 2025, using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security modules. The company explained that a flaw in the ceremony’s procedures caused a key wrapping and unwrapping step to generate a second set of weak keys alongside the original secure keys. Mistakenly, the weak keys were selected for publication to browser root stores rather than the properly generated strong keys. The incident revealed multiple human errors throughout the key lifecycle process and raised concerns about inadequate oversight controls.
Browser manufacturers moved swiftly to block certificates issued with the compromised intermediates within one to two days of discovery. eMudhra faced likely removal of its certificate authority status from the CA/Browser Forum, the industry organization governing TLS certificate standards. While the browser blocks eliminated much of the immediate threat, numerous other devices and systems that rely on these certificates operate on significantly longer update cycles, leaving potential vulnerability windows. Some embedded systems may never receive updates to block the compromised certificates entirely.
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