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Horrible public key tricks

The author creates a 'protest certificate' for their website that uses a deliberately weak, vanity public key (prime 313333333337) to embed a visible encoded message into the certificate itself. This proves that certificate authorities fail to validate key strength, while still maintaining encrypted web traffic.

Background

The project is hosted at maurycyz.com and demonstrates how Certificate Authorities like Let's Encrypt issue certificates without properly validating the cryptographic strength of public keys used in them.

Source
Lobsters
Published
Nov 9, 2026 at 08:55 PM
Score
5.0 / 10