On October 22, a Twitter user asked a simple question that most people, including most journalists, could not answer. "Can someone tell us how did eMudhra become the foundation of the global internet in the first place?"
The replies were quick and dismissive. "It didn't," wrote one user. "eMudhra is not the foundation of the internet. And never was," wrote another.
Both replies were closer to correct than the original tweet. But the underlying story, which a third user, Sandeep Srinivasa, laid out in a widely shared thread with screenshots, is real, documented, and did not get much attention in India this week. eMudhra, the Bengaluru-based digital identity company, has spent eight years as one of roughly a hundred organisations worldwide whose digital signature every major web browser trusts automatically. On October 22, its board decided to walk away from the part of that business that made it famous.
Every time a browser shows a secure, padlocked website, it is relying on a certificate issued by a Certificate Authority, or CA. A CA's job is to confirm that a website belongs to who it says it belongs to, and to sign a certificate vouching for that.
Browsers cannot personally verify every CA in the world. Instead, they maintain a short list of root CAs they trust directly, known as a root store. Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Microsoft Edge each run their own root store, with roughly a hundred organisations on each list. Any certificate that traces back to one of these roots is accepted without a warning.
eMudhra, operating globally under the brand name emSign, has been on that list since 2018.
Inclusion in a root store is not automatic. It runs through a public review process, largely carried out by volunteer engineers on a Mozilla mailing list called mozilla.dev.security.policy. A CA has to document its practices, pass independent audits, and answer questions from anyone who shows up to the thread.
In October 2018, Mozilla's own CA engineer at the time, Wayne Thayer, opened the review for four emSign roots operated by eMudhra. He listed several compliance gaps in eMudhra's policy documents that needed fixing, including rules around domain validation and improper handling of a security check called CAA. eMudhra corrected these before the roots were approved.
One participant in the thread, Nick Lamb, asked why an unfamiliar company should be trusted, writing that he had never heard of eMudhra before, "perhaps because they're Indian... but perhaps because they're just entirely new to this business," and asked who was behind the company.
eMudhra's written response to Mozilla, filed as part of its formal application, leaned heavily on its position in India's government digital infrastructure. "eMudhra has been a licensed CA under Controller of Certifying Authorities which operates the Indian Government Root for more than 10 years," the filing said, adding that the company had "issued over 35 million digital certificates," or about 3 percent of India's population at the time.
The filing went further. "eMudhra is a critical partner to Digital India and supports the usage of digital signatures on a variety of eGovernance platforms for Government of India including Company Law Board, Income Tax, Goods and Service Tax (GST / VAT), eProcurement, Travel Portals, Customs, Banking etc," it said. It added that eMudhra's technology was used by over 35 banks and had "a proprietary CA solution which is today used by the Indian Army and other defense establishments." The company also described itself as Vice Chairman of the Asia PKI Consortium and Chairman of the India PKI Forum, which it said is sponsored by the Government of India.
eMudhra said it needed an independent, globally trusted root specifically because its existing role under India's government-run certificate hierarchy could not support infrastructure development "across the region." Mozilla accepted the application.
On October 17, a security researcher reported to Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and eMudhra that the private keys for eight of eMudhra's intermediate CA certificates had been generated with what Google's Chrome security team called "insufficient randomness." A private key is supposed to be an enormous, effectively unguessable random number. According to the researcher's report, some of eMudhra's keys were small enough to work out almost instantly.
Chrome said it blocked the affected certificates within about 100 minutes of the report through an automatic update, without requiring users to do anything. Because Chrome requires all public website certificates to be logged in a public record called Certificate Transparency, and none of the eight compromised intermediates had ever issued a logged website certificate, Google said no fraudulent certificate from this flaw could have been used against Chrome or similar software.
Chrome went a step further and removed the root certificate that had issued those eight intermediates, called emSign ECC Root CA - G3, from its root store entirely. Mozilla took the same step for Firefox on October 20. The change takes effect for Chrome users from October 27.
eMudhra said no end-entity, meaning website-facing, certificates were ever issued from the eight affected intermediates, and that its own systems were not breached. The company has also acknowledged a separate, unresolved issue. On October 14, it published a certificate revocation list, a signed record of cancelled certificates, whose signature does not verify against the certificate authority's own key. A participant in Mozilla's public bug report suggested this may be the result of eMudhra signing the list with the wrong key, rather than a second compromised key, though this has not been confirmed. Chrome has posted a list of 12 questions to eMudhra in the same public report.
By Chrome's count of public Certificate Transparency logs, about 30,800 unexpired certificates traced back to the distrusted root as of October 21. Of those, 99.9 percent were issued through InCommon, a certificate service that the US higher-education technology consortium Internet2 runs for American universities. InCommon had moved its certificate issuance onto eMudhra's CertiNext platform between April and July this year.
That scale puts the "foundation of the global internet" framing in context. eMudhra held one of roughly a hundred keys that browsers trust by default, a genuinely consequential position, but the certificates actually affected by this week's action were concentrated overwhelmingly among American university websites, not Indian ones, and represent a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of HTTPS certificates active worldwide.
eMudhra's other businesses, including the digital signature certificates that run under India's own government-operated certificate hierarchy, its eSign service, its CertiNext platform, and its identity and KYC products, are not part of this exit and continue to operate. The digital signatures Indian taxpayers and businesses use for Income Tax and GST filings run through that domestic, government-rooted system, which this week's action by Chrome and Mozilla does not affect.
What remains open is eMudhra's separate RSA-based root, emSign Root CA - G1, which Mozilla has not distrusted and which eMudhra has described as the only alternative currently available for affected customers. Chrome has said it is still investigating whether to continue trusting eMudhra's remaining certificates at all.
In a press release on October 22, eMudhra said its board had voted to voluntarily withdraw from the global SSL/TLS certificate business. Chairman V. Srinivasan said the company had revoked the affected certificate authorities within 14 hours of discovery and disclosed the incident promptly, and reiterated that no end-entity certificates were issued and no data breach occurred.
Srinivasan said global SSL/TLS contributes about 1 percent of eMudhra's revenue, and that rising data sovereignty and compliance costs, combined with large competitors offering free certificates, had reduced the business case for staying in it. He also said "the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS's place in our business."
eMudhra said it will keep its certificate revocation and status-checking services running until every certificate it issued has expired or been replaced, and will complete its remaining commitments to browser root programs, including a full report on the root cause of the incident.