Comment by oofbey

The key generator is a FIPS certified HSM that created a strong key. They ran the key through some stupid script that zeroed out all the bytes except the last one. The point of a full FIPS audit is to check that you don’t do anything stupid with crypto like try to implement anything yourself and that you only use certified implementations. But that standard apparently doesn’t apply to CA’s. They only have to use FIPS modules to generate the keys but can do whatever idiocy they want after that. Therein lies the real problem.