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SQ20130

Detected expired certificates within the list of digital signatures that were cross-signed.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
failhighhigh4None

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 authorities 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 not timestamped, or those with signatures made after the expiration date of their issuing certificates, are no longer supported by the operating system. Failing to comply with the cross-signing requirements may result in application errors and availability outages.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Obtain a new code signing certificate, migrate to the new Windows Hardware Program, and 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