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

eMudhra's certificate authority private keys were catastrophically weak, consisting of single-byte numbers (4, 56, 115, etc.) instead of proper 384-bit random values, allowing them to be cracked in milliseconds. Eight intermediate certificates issued in April 2025 were compromised, prompting Chrome, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple to block them within hours. The flaw rendered the entire security model useless, as the keys could be brute-forced in at most 255 computational steps rather than the 2³⁸⁴ possibilities that should be required.