Skip to main content

SQ20131

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

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failhighhigh2tampering: fail
Reason: signature compliance mistakes

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. Analysis results are used to calculate incidence statistics for issues (policy violations) that Spectra Assure can detect in software packages.

This section is updated when new data becomes available.

Total amount of packages analyzed

  • RubyGems: 183K
  • Nuget: 644K
  • PyPi: 628K
  • NPM: 3.72M

Total detections per repository

For every repository, the chart shows the number of packages that triggered the software assurance policy. In other words, it shows how many packages in each package repository were found to have the specific issue described on this page. This information helps you understand how common the issue is across different software communities.

If a repository is absent from the chart, that means none of the packages in that repository triggered this policy during analysis, or the policy was not used during analysis.

Distribution of total detections by project popularity

For every repository, the chart shows how many of the total detections belong to the Top 100 (1-100), Top 1000 (101-1000) and Top 10 000 (1001-10 000) most downloaded projects. This information helps you understand the impact of the issue within each community, making it clearer when the issue affects the most popular projects.

If the chart shows zero values for all of the top project groups, that means all detections were in unranked projects (lower than 10 000 on the list of most downloaded projects).