Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key?
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours agoThey are saying there were mistakes made with their key generation scripts:
We have done some preliminary assessment, there appears to be a flaw in the KGC script that was used on that specific day to create these ECC issuers. As for these ECC keys, our review of the KGC, assessment of the code and view of HSM keys so far indicate that a) a set of original ECC keys were created onboard as expected b) an approved deviation to our usual KGC to test a wrap/unwrap was introduced as these keys were meant for export for this instance c) a flaw in the code resulted in the second pair of keys being created onboard which were weaker d) these second pair of weaker keys were used by mistake to create the csr (because the key labels were similar) and signed by our root e) the CSR from these weaker keys were also sent over to Sectigo for cross signing (we verified the files sent over to Sectigo)
Source: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c11
Personally I’m still a little confused why it makes any difference that the keys were intended for export to their European and US operations
shalafi@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Interesting question! Google spit this out and it makes sense:
The primary reason these specific keys/issuers were created was to solve data sovereignty and data residency requirements for customers in those regions.
Many European and US corporate clients operate under strict legal frameworks (like GDPR in Europe or various federal compliance standards in the US) that legally dictate where cryptographic infrastructure can live, where data can be decrypted, and who can possess the root or intermediate private keys.
Generating separate regional keys is a compliance mechanism to guarantee that a customer’s data or handshake traffic stays within their jurisdiction.