SQ20127
Detected digital signatures that contain a certificate that does not belong to any certificate chains.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | RL level | RL assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | pass | high | medium | None | None |
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 be either purchased from certificate authorities or be self-issued. Typically, certificates are issued by other parties that have higher user trust. This hierarchy of certificate issuance creates digital certificate chains, which start at the signing certificate and end with the certificate authority root. Digital signatures can contain multiple signing chains. Additionally, individual certificates that don't belong to any signing chains can be embedded. This is typically done by mistake during signing.
How to resolve the issue
- While there's no direct security impact, the issue might point to larger lapses in the digital signing process. Consult the certificate authority code signing documentation.
- If you're using Microsoft SignTool, you should check whether you are using the /ac parameter incorrectly.
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
- Certificate chain (External resource - NIST)
- Root certificate (External resource - Wikipedia)