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SQ20113

Detected digital signatures that contain a certificate trying to impersonate a trusted publisher.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failhighmedium1tampering: fail
Reason: impersonated signatures found

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. Without independent identity validation provided by a reputable certificate authority, any information contained by the digital signature can at best be considered questionable. Identity information within self-issued certificates can easily be impersonated by a third party. We detected that the digital signature refers to a trusted software publisher identity. Since the certificate used to make this digital signature is self-issued, it can't be considered trustworthy. Most software packages that report identity impersonation attempts have malicious intent.

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. Analysis results are used to calculate incidence statistics for issues (policy violations) that Spectra Assure can detect in software packages.

This section is updated when new data becomes available.

Total amount of packages analyzed

  • RubyGems: 183K
  • Nuget: 644K
  • PyPi: 628K
  • NPM: 3.72M

Total detections per repository

For every repository, the chart shows the number of packages that triggered the software assurance policy. In other words, it shows how many packages in each package repository were found to have the specific issue described on this page. This information helps you understand how common the issue is across different software communities.

If a repository is absent from the chart, that means none of the packages in that repository triggered this policy during analysis, or the policy was not used during analysis.

Distribution of total detections by project popularity

For every repository, the chart shows how many of the total detections belong to the Top 100 (1-100), Top 1000 (101-1000) and Top 10 000 (1001-10 000) most downloaded projects. This information helps you understand the impact of the issue within each community, making it clearer when the issue affects the most popular projects.

If the chart shows zero values for all of the top project groups, that means all detections were in unranked projects (lower than 10 000 on the list of most downloaded projects).