Tech news picked on 2026-10-25
Weak intermediate CA key at India's certificate authority eMudhra and its impact on HTTPS trust
- A certificate authority (CA) is a top-level organization that browsers and devices trust by default. It is the starting point for checking whether a website's HTTPS certificate is genuine, so if this organization's private key is exposed, fake certificates that look normal can be created.
- According to the source, eMudhra created a very weak intermediate CA key because of a bug in its key generation script, and this key was wrongly adopted for actual operation. The source says the top 47 bytes were 0, making it effectively a key at the level of 1 bytes. This point cites analyst Scott Helme's post.
- The author interprets that with a key this weak, an attacker could recover the signing key and create forged certificates, which could be used in man-in-the-middle attacks such as on public Wi-Fi. The source does not confirm any actual case of exploitation.
- eMudhra said it revoked the related CA within 14 hours of discovery, that no final certificates were issued, and that no data was leaked. It later announced it would exit the global TLS certificate business, and the author criticizes this response for lacking an acknowledgment of responsibility.
How to Ask AI to Change Technical Diagrams by Art Style and Animate Them as GIFs
- The writer of the Qiita post, a Japanese developer tech blog platform, wrote that as more text appears to be written by generative AI, good articles are also being ignored. So they chose to insert several diagrams between paragraphs, and the original does not give figures showing whether this increased views or likes.
- The writer explains that SVG is a vector image file that describes pictures in text, so generative AI can draw it directly from text instructions alone. The AWS Lambda explanation also presents one prompt where only the art style changes, such as a red pen teacher, technical drawing, magazine page, or comic.
- The animated GIF is presented as a prompt that passes the previously made SVG diagram back in, asking for an animation where requests flow along arrows and boxes glow, looping every 6 seconds. It adds conditions to keep text still so it can be read, and to repeat seamlessly without a break.