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SQ20124

Detected digital signatures that contain a certificate with a short and predictable serial number.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
NonepasslowmediumNoneNone

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 purchased from a certificate authority, a certificate must conform to industry standards and best practices. One such requirement is that certificate serial numbers should not be a short or a sequential integer. Every certificate authority must generate a unique serial number on each issuance. That number should not be predictable, as attackers may leverage this to create forged certificates with identical or similar attributes. While a commercial certificate authority is unlikely to go against these recommendations, some policy deviations can occur in practice.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Communicate the detected issue to your certificate issuer, and have a new certificate created to resolve it.
  • Re-sign the software component with your newly issued certificate.

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