Indian digital trust company eMudhra has decided to withdraw from its global SSL/TLS certificate business following the discovery of eight intermediate certificate authorities with dangerously weak private keys.
The company’s board approved the decision on Thursday, October 22, five days after a security researcher reported the issue to major browser makers and eMudhra. The incident has prompted Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to block the affected certificates and distrust the root certificate above them, raising concerns about the security of websites and other systems that rely on the affected certificate chain.
According to the research findings, the private keys were generated with insufficient randomness, making them possible to recover almost instantly from publicly available certificate information. The eight intermediate certificates were created during a key generation ceremony on April 30, 2025, but the problem went undetected for approximately 18 months. The affected certificates included six intended for website TLS connections and two designed for code signing, which could potentially allow attackers to forge trusted credentials in systems that continued to accept them. eMudhra says it revoked all eight intermediate certificates on October 18 and maintains that its infrastructure was not breached and no end-user certificates were issued through the affected intermediates.
The incident led browser security teams to take additional action against eMudhra’s certificate hierarchy. Mozilla removed trust in the emSign ECC Root CA – G3 certificate on October 20, while Google announced that Chrome would remove the same root from its trusted certificate store, with the change expected to reach users on Tuesday morning, October 27, Pacific time. The root removal is designed to protect software that does not reliably receive certificate revocation updates, but it also means legitimate certificates issued under that root may stop working in affected browsers.
The scale of the migration could be significant. According to figures discussed in Mozilla’s public incident tracker, approximately 30,800 unexpired certificates chained to the affected root were recorded in public Certificate Transparency logs as of October 21. Around 99.9% of those certificates were reportedly issued through InCommon, the certificate service operated by Internet2 for the higher education community. InCommon moved its certificate service to eMudhra’s CertiNext platform between April and July 2026, adding complexity to the transition for institutions and other organisations that rely on the service.
Google has advised website operators whose certificates chain to emSign ECC Root CA – G3 to immediately obtain and install replacement TLS certificates from another publicly trusted certificate authority hierarchy included in the Chrome Root Store. Although the affected intermediate authorities had not issued website certificates recorded in Certificate Transparency logs before the blocking action, the broader removal of trust in their root still threatens the availability of legitimate websites using other certificates within the same hierarchy.
eMudhra announced that the global SSL/TLS certificate business accounts for approximately 1% of its revenue. The company cited rising data sovereignty requirements, compliance obligations, operating costs and competition from providers offering certificates for free as reasons for its withdrawal. It also said the public scrutiny surrounding the incident was disproportionate to the business’s contribution to its overall operations.
To help customers through the transition, eMudhra has committed to providing replacement certificates free of charge through partners. In an October 22 update, the company confirmed that certificates issued by Sectigo would be available as an alternative for customers. Its G1 RSA root certificates will continue serving customers during the transition, while its revocation and certificate status services will remain operational until every certificate it issued has expired or been replaced. The company has also committed to providing a full root-cause report to browser root programs.
Customers may nevertheless need to review their certificate configurations rather than assume that switching automatically to another certificate will resolve every issue. Cornell University, for example, has advised affected certificate holders to request RSA certificates instead of ECC certificates, as the InCommon RSA hierarchy is currently unaffected by the G3 distrust. The University of Michigan has issued a similar warning, noting that InCommon’s RSA certificates are not currently affected but that the G1 root could face further scrutiny. It has identified Let’s Encrypt as an alternative.
The incident has also raised questions about eMudhra’s certificate revocation process. On October 14, the company published a certificate revocation list for emSign Root TLS CA – G1 whose signature did not verify against the expected certificate authority key, according to a researcher investigating the incident in Mozilla’s public bug report. A participant in the discussion suggested that the list appeared to have been signed with an eMudhra Online Certificate Status Protocol certificate key, indicating a possible signing error rather than evidence of another weak private key.
The issue attracted further attention because eMudhra had published invalid revocation lists for six of the same intermediate certificates in 2025. The company previously said those lists were initially signed using the intended private keys but were re-signed with the flawed keys after the signatures proved invalid. Google has questioned why the earlier incident report did not disclose that two sets of key pairs existed for the affected authorities, raising concerns about transparency and incident handling. eMudhra has said it is investigating the matter, while Chrome continues to review whether the company’s remaining certificate authorities should retain their trusted status.
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Despite the withdrawal, eMudhra says its other operations will continue normally. Its digital signature certificates, eSign services, emSigner eSignature Suite, CertiNext platform, enterprise public key infrastructure solutions and identity and authentication products operate on separate infrastructure and are not affected by the incident. The company is now preparing to leave the global SSL/TLS certificate market while assisting customers with certificate replacements and responding to questions from browser security teams.
