eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business;
Press Release titled “eMudhra to Exit global SSL/TLS Certificate Business;
Will Sharpen Focus on Core Enterprise Solutions and trust services other than SSL/TLS”
No, the customers for commercial certs are mid-level managers, who believe paying thousands of dollars for something you can also get for free means you are getting a higher quality - or in this case even believe it is "more secure". Rebranding will absolutely work for that, especially when you market your untrusted root as "ISO-certified private dedicated cloud-based PKI-as-a-Service".
The technical people will just install a certbot and use the default Let's Encrypt config.
If they wanted to continue to make money, they could: exit the business, wait a bit, change the company name, and re-enter the business. Where "change the company name" could mean starting an actual new company, but with the same people, offices, contacts (OK, small problem there) and so on.
Yes, its all very well someone here shouting about "the absolutely brutal question battery the Chrome team publicly submitted to eMudhra".
But in all honesty there are serious questions to be asked about:
a) The initial approval process for ANY CA
b) The ongoing monitoring process for ANY CA
The fact this CA was based in India ultimately has nothing to do with it if we are being completely honest here.
Clearly there is a fundamental problem with the overarching approval and monitoring process which means it could have happened anywhere. This time it just happened to be India.
Secondly, in direct reference to the "far away company" comment India does have quite strict controls on both certain technical things (speaking generally here, not specifically in relation to certs ... e.g. use of sat phones). And in general it is quite difficult (read: almost impossible) to turn up in India and do business as an external company. So there is probably a genuine need for an Indian company CA since not every body can/wants to use Let's Encrypt or whatever.
CA approvals are bad. From 2000 to 2015, I ran an org where we allow-listed a modest subset of the the CAs that were approved by Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. There were too many incidents and bad actors.
Microsoft, in particular, had strong transparency around CA approval processes that were reasonable. It was weird.
Not to give into conspiracy theories but this company might be ideologically even if not materially aligned to current regime in India. With right kind of nudge any kind business contract is possible without any competency.
As a reminder Mozilla was warned not to add the Chinese government as a ca they pushed back claiming lack of evidence and only removed them as a ca once cnnic got caught issuing certs for google domains (by accident )
Yes, not sure what the timeline was where trust was given to this company. Just horrible for the entire secure Internet. They've yet to answer many of the basic questions raised throughout this process too.
If anyone else also struggles to understand all the "4" references in the comments: One of their private keys was "4", with others also being in the 2-3 digit range.
I think this opens bigger questions on who and how people get access to these capabilities. After that recent cold wallet physical supply chain take over, what sort of people are able to get certs for anything they need?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c30
https://emudhra.com/en/press-release/emudhra-to-exit-global-...
Is there some reputation left to salvage here that I'm not aware of? Who would trust them?
The technical people will just install a certbot and use the default Let's Encrypt config.
But in all honesty there are serious questions to be asked about:
a) The initial approval process for ANY CA
b) The ongoing monitoring process for ANY CA
The fact this CA was based in India ultimately has nothing to do with it if we are being completely honest here.
Clearly there is a fundamental problem with the overarching approval and monitoring process which means it could have happened anywhere. This time it just happened to be India.
Secondly, in direct reference to the "far away company" comment India does have quite strict controls on both certain technical things (speaking generally here, not specifically in relation to certs ... e.g. use of sat phones). And in general it is quite difficult (read: almost impossible) to turn up in India and do business as an external company. So there is probably a genuine need for an Indian company CA since not every body can/wants to use Let's Encrypt or whatever.
Microsoft, in particular, had strong transparency around CA approval processes that were reasonable. It was weird.
This is a sample on what it looks like during covid lockdown : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1728790
Far away from it the default country?
Apparently they generated them like this: https://xkcd.com/221/
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZTqEHehcETo
Surely they should be investigated by the local regulator.
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/meity-forms-team-to-probe...