First screen, captured 4 days ago.

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

What HN thinks

The private key was 4, and the thread spent hours debating whether that's prime, whether CAs should exist, and whether to jailbreak their TVs with it.

Too many CAs, weak audits
With hundreds of trusted roots and audits that only check for FIPS key generators, one incompetent CA can compromise everyone; stricter end-to-end auditing would have caught this.
Replace CAs with DNS or pinning
Some argue keys should live in secure DNS (DANE/DNSSEC) or be exchanged directly via QR codes and trust graphs, while critics say DNSSEC is broken and personal trust doesn't scale.
Unpatchable devices are the real mess
Routers, TVs and bundled CA stores in pip, Node, Java and compiled binaries will trust the bad roots until 2039, though some see it as a chance to jailbreak IoT gear.

Consensus: Most agree certificate transparency limits damage for modern browsers but leaves non-browser clients and frozen-firmware devices exposed, and that basic sanity checks nobody ran should have caught a key of 4.

Recommended in the comments

Paranoid Crypto ↗ (library): The original reporter found the weak eMudhra keys by running it out of the box on the CCADB corpus.
Certificate Transparency ↗ (other): Browsers requiring SCTs reject certificates an attacker minted without logging them.
DNS over HTTPS (other): Favoured as a more practical DNS security approach than DNSSEC.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 3 days ago.

Points: 875
Comments: 456
Best rank: #4
Posted: 2026-10-21 by hkc
Category: Security

emudhra certificate-authorities pki tls elliptic-curve-cryptography web-pki code-signing

All captures:

Full page

Captured 4 days ago. Click for the whole screenshot. The page is longer than 12,000px, so the screenshot stops there: read the rest on scotthelme.co.uk ↗

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