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SQ20128

Detected digital signatures that do not contain a reference to a certificate revocation server.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
passmediummediumNoneNone

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 a certificate authority must be able revoke a certificate if its misuse was reported and independently confirmed. Software users rely on the certificate revocation process to defend from malicious actors that might be controlling a certificate issued to a trusted publisher. Operating systems periodically refresh local copies of certificate revocation lists. If the signature does not include a hyperlink to the certificate revocation server, its status cannot be checked. While a commercial certificate authority is unlikely to omit this information, 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.
  • Use your newly issued certificate to re-sign the software component.

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