SQ20119
Detected digital signatures that rely on a weak digest algorithm for integrity validation.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | RL level | RL assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | pass | low | medium | None | None |
About the issue
Digital signatures are applied to applications, packages and documents as a cryptographically secured authenticity record. Signatures verify the origin and the integrity of the object they apply to. The integrity validation relies on the cryptographic strength of the encryption and the hash verification algorithm. If either of the two is considered weak by current standards, there is a chance the signed object could be maliciously modified, without triggering the integrity failure check.
How to resolve the issue
- Create signatures with strong ECC key-length of at least 224 bits, or RSA key-length of at least 2048 bits, and use SHA256 as the hashing algorithm. While encryption key-length upgrade does require you to obtain a new certificate, the hashing algorithm can freely be selected during signing.
- With Microsoft SignTool, you can specify the hashing algorithm using the /fd SHA256 parameter.
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
- Tampering with signed objects without breaking integrity seal (ReversingLabs blog)
- Message digest (External resource - NIST)