SQ20129
Detected digital signatures that chain to the deprecated cross-signature authorities.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | RL level | RL assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 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. Cross-certificates are digital certificates issued by one certificate authority, and then used to sign the public key for the root certificate of another certificate authority. Cross-certificates allow creating a chain of trust from a single and trusted root certificate authority to multiple others. This digital signing program was used primarily for Windows kernel drivers. However, this signing program has now been deprecated. Existing driver packages that were timestamped before the expiration date of their signing certificates will continue working without any user or software publisher intervention.
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
Recommended reading
- Cross certificate (External resource - NIST)
- Cross-Certificates for Kernel Mode Code Signing (External resource - Microsoft)
- Microsoft Windows Hardware Developer Program (External resource - Microsoft)