Tech giants rush to block 8 eMudhra certs that could enable fake sites

Tech giants have deployed emergency blocks against eight vulnerable digital certificates that could allow attackers to impersonate legitimate websites.

By Tuesday, browser developers and other major technology companies had deployed protections against eight intermediate certificates issued by India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited after discovering that their private keys were insufficiently secure. 

Mozilla cryptography engineer Dennis Jackson wrote in an incident report that Mozilla independently recovered the private keys when it first received notice of the flaw on Saturday, confirming that the key-generation process was “flawed” and “trivial to exploit.” 

An attacker who intercepts a user’s connection could use fraudulent certificates to impersonate a legitimate website and potentially read or alter the information exchanged, according to Mozilla.

While many companies quickly blocked the affected certificates, the threat remains for applications and systems that don’t receive those blocks automatically.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Mozilla Firefox’s security team said it received the report on Saturday and responded by blocking the affected certificates in Firefox using OneCRL, which it completed the same day. It then released an update for its browser on Desktop and Android, protecting users with custom settings that prevented them from receiving the OneCRL update.