Comment by silvestrov
13 hours ago
Even just a human glancing at the private key should do it.
Don't they even test script changes on a staging server? How could there be such a script error in production that was not caught in testing/staging?
This sounds very like a fundamental organization error, not an innocent whoopsie. It should lead to a permanent ban of the organization.
Well humans should NOT glance at private keys! That is the whole point of HSMs!
I'm still flabergasted the HSM allowed this key to be generated. Then again, I've worked with HSMs, there are always many mistakes in the firmware, usually less severe though.
It seems there was some issue with the ceremony with some wrapping/unwrapping scripts.
They explicitly said they wanted to export the keys from the HSM; the keys were intended for USA/Europe (for sovereignty reasons) but were never actually used.
It seems the HSM itself worked, their ceremony around wrapping/unwrapping didn't.
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But eMudhra wanted to (was required to) export the keys.
So using an HSM in the first place is a security theater. Or that this HSM isn't really an HSM since it allows for export of the private key.
The trusted enclave in a MacBook is more secure than this HSM.
There is something called "wrapping/unwrapping" - you encrypt the key, move it to the other HSM, and it unwraps it. So what moves around is encrypted. I don't know enough about HSMs to tell you if it's done using symetric or asymetric crypto, but no the key should not move around in the plaintext.
The write-up from eMudhra mentions something about wrapping/unwrapping ceremony failing.
Most HSMs used by CAs are pretty trash tbh.