Yet another Hacker News

181 points ahlCVA 2 hours ago 45 comments

tecleandor 1 hour ago | parent

This is gonna be great to sniff apps in a couple older Android phones I have around. Hope they're not pinning certificates.

selcuka 4 minutes ago | parent

Can't you install your own CA to Android phones?

DrammBA 1 hour ago | parent

I love how someone's security disaster becomes someone else's feature.

xp84 1 hour ago | parent

I agree. We may as well make some lemonade out of these lemons. IMHO the ability of companies to 'securely' close off hardware and software from their users is a sad casualty of the success of cryptography, and not a feature.

r3trohack3r 1 hour ago | parent

Most things have tradeoffs

At some point you’re forced to stack rank two or more of your values in a case where they’re mutually exclusive

tonymet 1 hour ago | parent

I seriously laughed at the flag. public wifi is going to be lit.

MajorTakeaway 27 minutes ago | parent

What about using a VPN on public wifi?

Bratmon 38 minutes ago | parent

As the percentage of technology controlled by people actively using it to do evil increases, so does the net value to society of a trivially-expliotable zero-day.

shrubble 1 hour ago | parent

If I’m understanding correctly, you could sniff the communication between your Smart TV and the manufacturer using this method?

quotemstr 1 hour ago | parent

If the TV isn't older than a few years, if it's not checking CRLs, and if it hasn't yet patched itself.

kevin_nisbet 1 hour ago | parent

Possibly. But some manufacturers may not have the full set of roots, use a private authority, or do certificate pinning.

the_snooze 1 hour ago | parent

As long as the smart TV still trusts eMudhra, then yeah. You'll want to super careful and prevent the TV from pulling updates that could revoke that trust.

skeledrew 1 hour ago | parent

This is how fame happens.

maxlin 16 minutes ago | parent

infamy*

seniorsassycat 1 hour ago | parent

How much of a boon is this for jailbreaking, reverse engineering, and mitm really?

bryancoxwell 46 minutes ago | parent

Been wondering this as well. I also don’t really understand the mitm to jailbreak pipeline

flexagoon 38 minutes ago | parent

Some smart devices pull config files from a server. By mitming that, you can change the config to enable some sort of developer mode on the device.

qwertyforce 37 minutes ago | parent

Maybe intercept firmware update and then reverse engineer it and find rce?

himata4113 34 minutes ago | parent

client on startup asks: hey server do you have any ads for me

server: here are latest ads

btw, the ads are capable of code execution for whatever reason so now you have an RCE on your hands for your client

sippingabonedry 1 hour ago | parent

Wonderful.

Anyone else bother to notice iOS still trusts 2 of the forged certs on the test site? I'd like to politely know what the fuck is going on because this is far from being "fixed".

xuki 1 hour ago | parent

Which iOS version? 27.0.1 here and they're all revoked for me.

snailmailman 1 hour ago | parent

FWIW i havent updated my ios, I'm on 26.6.2, and they all got revoked for me. The revocation shouldn't require an iOS update.

TYPE_FASTER 19 minutes ago | parent

I’m on the same version, and according to https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/ they have not been revoked for me. Maybe phased rollout.

sippingabonedry 1 hour ago | parent

26.7.1 still (randomly) trusts 2 out of the 12 compromised chains. All browsers impacted.

Edit: I'm not the only one with this issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1xbvxgd/emudhra_cer...

My best guess is it's soft-failing on a failed OCSP lookup?

robrain 4 minutes ago | parent

Mine were all blocked this morning when I informed my family of the mitigation methods.

I've just been rechecking everything and both iOS and MacOS browsers (Safari and Orion tested) now accept one (for MacOS, 27.0.1) or three (for iOS, 27.0.1) of them. I know the revocation is not an OS update, just including the version number for completeness.

wildmXranat 1 hour ago | parent

Someone should've coined this disaster as "QuattroFail" to give it a little panache and international mystery

gnabgib 1 hour ago | parent

"4" was only some of the keys (they were all <256).. ByteFail seems more accurate

mintflow 1 hour ago | parent

Haha, this is quite interesting to test if you need to update various of program (if they do not use the sys ca chain)

xmcp123 1 hour ago | parent

Never thought there would be a silver lining on this issue. Fuck yeah.

Confiks 50 minutes ago | parent

It's almost a shame it includes the private key and doesn't bruteforce it in-band for every request.

subscribed 27 minutes ago | parent

OMG, that would be brutal

0xbadcafebee 46 minutes ago | parent

Remember twenty years ago when tools like this were "controversial" because you could "just download it and hack anyone" ? Except the only systems you could hack were... insecure ones... so people updated their systems to resist the tools' attacks, and we all ended up more secure.

deadbabe 43 minutes ago | parent

Can someone explain the significance here, a lot has happened in 24 hours.

Gigachad 40 minutes ago | parent

An Indian Certificate Authority was found to have a private key that’s literally the number 4. So using that you can sign valid https certs for anything that isn’t checking the revoked list.

brendoelfrendo 30 minutes ago | parent

They had 8 intermediate certs with private keys under 1 byte (<256). The most egregious was 4, but any of those 8 were pitiful.

jolmg 26 minutes ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMudhra#2026_intermediate_cert...

> On October 17, 2026, browser root programs received a report that the private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate certificates had been compromised. The private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237. A P-384 elliptic-curve private key normally has about 384 bits of entropy, but these keys had between 3 and 8 bits.

lambda 38 minutes ago | parent

Oh, nice. I was thinking of setting up a proxy for this for testing, nice to just have it working out of the box.

CGamesPlay 24 minutes ago | parent

This looks like it's using the emSign root path, which is useful, but the AAA root path is equally useful in different cases. The AAA root path was disabled for https on root stores newer than February 2025, but has been in root stores since forever. Meanwhile the emSign root path was only included in root stores since ~2018 and got removed in October 2026.

So from the perspective of hacking old IoT devices, if your device hasn't been since 2018, the AAA path should work; if since February 2025, either path works; if since October 2026, the emSign path.

cherioo 17 minutes ago | parent

I thought this cert only recently gets trusted, so only newish but not too new devices would be vulnerable. Am i misunderstanding how this works?

chatmasta 6 minutes ago | parent

Looking forward to setting this up manually after my agent refuses to do it. Like the good ol’ days.

closetheloopdev 4 minutes ago | parent

I created a proxy using the 6 compromised eMudhra CA keys (2 of the 8 are code-signing and not for TLS). I initially tried just one (the one with d=4) like in the commit, but it did not seem to work for anything. Once I added all 6 keys, I was able to intercept some.

I was mainly interested in testing which IoT devices are affected and protecting them, not trying to sniff their traffic since it's been a long day. My proxy thus just intercepted and forwarded the traffic upstream using a fresh TLS connection that does not use the compromised keys.