Making a mistake with its certificate keys appears to have cost eMudhra dearly.
eMudhra Limited has shed roughly Rs. 1,450 crore in market value in just two trading sessions, after its stock fell another 18% on Thursday, October 22 to ₹364.45, a day after it had already hit its 20% lower circuit. The stock has now dropped from a pre-crisis close of ₹540 on October 20 to ₹351.9 today — a cumulative fall of about 32.5% — as the company grapples with fallout from a global cybersecurity scare over compromised private keys in eight of its digital certificates.
Why the stock is in freefall
The slide began after security researchers discovered on October 17 that the private keys behind eight of eMudhra’s digital certificates had been generated so weakly that they could be cracked almost instantly. Mozilla, Google, Apple and Microsoft all moved to block the certificates within days, and two of them escalated further on October 20 by withdrawing trust in an entire eMudhra root certificate — a step that forces the company to migrate roughly 30,000 customer certificates to an alternative, unaffected root.
eMudhra has said the flaw traced back to a scripting error during a key-generation ceremony in April 2025, that it has stopped issuing from the affected root, and that it is re-verifying every key ceremony it has ever conducted. Markets, however, appear to be pricing in a deeper concern: that the incident could dent trust in eMudhra’s core certificate-authority business well beyond the eight certificates directly involved.
What to watch next
The stock’s two-day slide has already pushed shares well off their 52-week high of around ₹826, and trading volumes have stayed elevated as the sell-off continues into a second day. The next signals investors are likely to watch for: whether eMudhra completes its migration of affected certificates without further disruption, whether any additional browser or OS vendors take action beyond what Mozilla and Chrome have already done, and whether the company’s enterprise and digital-signature businesses — which make up the bulk of its revenue — show any signs of customers pulling back. eMudhra’s next scheduled earnings update will be the first formal opportunity for the company to quantify the incident’s financial impact.