Disgraced former CA eMudhra blames buggy script for hopelessly weak certificates

But the script contained what Kumar described as “a bug/defect in the import code [which] resulted in a read‑back from the unwrapped object that truncated the private value, so the certified public keys correspond to private scalars below the expected range and are recoverable from public information.” The truncation is the key problem here, because it appears that eMudhra ignored 47 of the 48 bytes, producing its infamously insecure single-byte keys such as the number four. Whatever the nature of the bug, Kumar asserts it was “a custom script run only on an isolated ceremony host and was not a function of the emCA software.” eMudhra needed that script because “global supply chain constraints” meant it couldn’t acquire the hardware security modules (HSMs), devices that generate and store cryptographic keys, that it wanted to use when creating a set of certificates for use in the USA.