Skip to main content

SQ20121

Detected digital signatures that have not been performed with an extended validation certificate.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
NonepasslowhighNoneNone

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. When a certificate is purchased from a certificate authority, the subject that requests it goes through an identity validation process. Depending on the certificate type, those checks can be basic or extended. Confirming the subject identity is a multi-step process, and the requesting subject can be mapped to its legal entity name only through extended validation of submitted documents. Extended identity validation typically costs more, and it takes longer for a certificate to be issued when this process is correctly followed.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Consider the benefits of acquiring extended validation certificates. Operating systems tend to be more trusting of software packages signed in this way. Certain security warnings and prompts might also be automatically suppressed. This reduces the number of support tickets for organizations that opt to use extended validation certificates.

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