978
Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.
exploiting compromised certificates requires an active adversary-in-the-middle attack, meaning the attacker must act as a proxy between two TLS parties and receive encrypted traffic, decrypt it, reencrypt it, and send it to the other party. Such capabilities, in some cases, are usually limited to only the most well-resourced attackers. People with control of a local network—at a coffee shop, university, or other organization—face much less of a challenge.
https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
So if my understanding is correct, to be exploited the attacker would already need to be in a position to intercept your traffic, but this means when they do they can effectively impersonate anyone.
This could actually be an interesting attack vector for hacking IOT devices. If you control the DNS server the device connects to you can get it to trust literally anything.
MITM HTTPS traffic without a key doesn't really let you do much of anything, especially with stuff like HSTS. You can mess with DNS, but the whole certificate authority thing is meant to make it so you can't redirect someone's traffic to a malicious server.
This leaked private key completely destroys that guarantee, making it extremely scary. ~Plus, saved traffic for any site signed by this key which didn't use PFS will be subject to post-facto decryption.~
edit: I don't know wtf I was thinking, the decryption thing is nonsense.
I don't think so about the post-facto decrypt. Keyexchange runs with the certs of the destination server. The cerst affected by the leak are intermediate certs which give trust to a cert chain AFAIK.
You're absolutely right, I had shit all mixed up in my head. Oops 😅 thank you for the correction.
Yup.
These days, a lot of firmware blobs are also signed with the vendor's key, so you'd still need to get past that hurdle.
Wasn't the Gamer's Nexus video on LG spy TVs, saying that the telemetry traffic is protected by SSL and thus they couldn't figure out exactly what was sent? Would they be able to use the leaked keys to decrypt the traffic?
That should be possible yes, depending on how those TVs handle their cert stores.
wait how would that work? don't LG TVs use a random CA that likely isn't eMurdha?
Most systems trust a number of "root" CAs, including the one that signed the eMudhra certificate. It's possible LG TVs look specifically for a trusted LG certificate, but it's also very possible they use the same certificate stores as most major OSes/browsers.
Thanks, I wasn't sure if it mattered that the leaked keys in this case were for intermediate certs and not root certs (afaik)
This news is scary and bad, but if the root keys ever leak, the Internet as we know it is fucked.