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SQ20131

Detected digital signatures that used an expired certificate during cross-signing.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
failhighhigh2None

About the issue​

Digital signatures are applied to applications, packages and documents as a cryptographically secured authenticity record. These signatures verify the origin and the integrity of the object they are applied to. Cross-certificates are digital certificates issued by one certificate authority that get used to sign the public key for the root certificate of another certificate authority. Cross-certificates provide a means to create a chain of trust from a single, 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