this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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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/

Xkcd 221: int getRandomNumber() { return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll. guaranteed to be random. }

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[–] magnue@lemmy.world 37 points 10 hours ago (9 children)

Adversary-in-the-middle = man-in-the-middle?

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 9 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

First time I've come across the phrase but it sounds like the same thing. It's gender neutral though I guess. Maybe that's it?

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It's commonly used and you often see the abbreviation AITM these days. You're right about the reason.

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

Good to know. Cheers.

[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 6 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

We had one compulsory course in English at university. The professor corrected a "man-in-the-middle" I had in a field-specific paper. She preferred "middle man". She did buy that it was an established term in cryptography, though.

[–] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 4 points 8 hours ago

It's a term for the attack, yes but not for the attacker

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[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 84 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

private keys were ... 56

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 86 points 14 hours ago (7 children)

As noted, most browsers have already blocked the intermediate certificates. The exception appears to be Edge running on Windows 10, which at the time this article went live was still connecting to 12 vulnerable hosts.

LOL

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[–] thisbenzingring@lemmy.today 210 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (8 children)

I think that this isn't really getting the right attention, about what a massive WTF situation this is...

its a 384 bit certificate and this is the private key

00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:
00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:
00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:
00:00:04

that is just fucking NUTS

[–] Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

that’s a very long way to spell the random number 4

[–] miadidi@lemmy.world 28 points 13 hours ago (1 children)
[–] victorz@lemmy.world 12 points 10 hours ago

That kind of removes the bit size and hides it in assumption.

[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 12 hours ago

It's like winning the lottery

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 79 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Phew to think how close it is to my private key

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[–] clickthebuton@lemmy.world 31 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

SSL has had a broken trust model for decades. We need something truly decentralized and auditable.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 15 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

Ok, but what would that look like in a way that would have mitigated this situation? Seems likely that such a system could actually exacerbate this specific scenario.

[–] clickthebuton@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

SSL tries to solve several problems at once (identity verification + encryption of connection) over a protocol (TCP/IP) that isn't cryptographically tied together. Some very dedicated, smart people have sketched out some ideas on this. Basically, this compromise only happened because we're relying on a chain of third parties and intermediaries to do this verification of certs.

Web of trust, blockchain-based system (where a name like ebay.com can be registered and publish their own cert, so you can prove whoever owns ebay.com also owns that cert), a TCP/IP replacement that you can derive a key from (there are several interesting proposals here, some of which run on top of IP), are all ways of solving this problem with different tradeoffs.

This biggest problem like with any protocol change is inertia behind SSL. Same reason a number of excellent anti-spam protocol enhancements never made it to be widely accepted in SMTP and now everybody is fleeing to other methods of communicating without SMTPs issues.

[–] mschae@discuss.mschae23.de 5 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Something like DANE, maybe? Only the websites actually using the compromised certificates would be compromised.

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