SQ20104
Detected digital signatures that used an expired certificate during signing.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | RL level | RL assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | fail | high | medium | 2 | tampering: fail Reason: signature compliance mistakes |
About the issue
Digital signatures are applied to applications, packages and documents as a cryptographically secured authenticity record. Signatures are made using digital certificates, which can either be purchased from certificate authorities or be self-issued. Certificates have a validity period during which they can be used to create signatures. After the validity period has expired, the certificate is considered invalid and should not be used for signing. This warning means we detected that an already expired certificate was used to create a digital signature. Failing to comply with the established code signing best practices may result in application errors and availability outages.
How to resolve the issue
- Obtain a new code signing certificate and re-sign the software component.
Incidence statistics
ReversingLabs periodically collects and analyzes the contents of popular software package repositories for threat research purposes.
For every repository, the chart shows the percentage of projects that triggered the software assurance policy. In other words, it shows how many projects were found to have the specific issue described on this page.
The percentages are calculated from the total amount of packages analyzed:
- RubyGems: 174K
- Nuget: 189K
- PyPi: 403K
- NPM: 2.1M
Recommended reading
- Digital certificates (External resource - Microsoft)
- Security Considerations for Code Signing (External resource: PDF document - NIST)