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SQ20112

Detected digital signatures made with a certificate issued by the signing party.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
NonepasslowlowNoneNone

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. However, self-issued certificates can't be easily trusted. They only prove the possession of a private key that was used to generate a signature. Any other identity information within such certificates can easily be impersonated by a third party. Certificate authorities must verify the identity of a subject that they issue the certificates to. Software users rely on certificate authorities to confirm the accuracy of the information contained within the signature. Therefore, the users are less likely to trust files signed by an unverified party.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Acquire a new certificate and re-sign the software component, then publish the software package again.

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