5 Essential Tips for Code Signing Certificate Management

Code signing pinpoints the organization name or publisher’s details and removes the “Unknown Publisher” security warnings. In a nutshell, it ensures code content integrity and reveals the trustworthiness of the code.

One of the biggest challenges with code signing is safeguarding the private signing key linked to the code signing certificate. The key loses both its value and trust if it is compromised. The result? The software you have signed is jeopardized. To put this into perspective, 70% of surveyed technology organizations were impacted by a software supply chain attack in 2021.

To counteract this, we’ve listed five essential tips for code signing below. Read on to discover more.

Why PKI and Digital Certificates are Important

First, discuss public key infrastructure (PKI) and digital certificates. This is particularly why code-signing certificates are crucial to the security of your software. The advantages? They promote data integrity and digital identity. Because of this, code signing certificate management is paramount. It’s used globally by start-ups, small to medium-sized businesses, and large corporations.

Below, you will discover top tips on successfully managing code signing certification today.

1. Lessen Private Key Access

To avoid jeopardizing the trust and value of your key, you should ensure as few connections as possible to computers with keys. To do this, you can:

• Adopt physical security measures to lessen key access when embracing code signing certificate management.
• Only give a set number of users key access. This lessens the risk of a key being compromised. The more people have access to the key, the more likely it will be exposed to risk.

2. Safeguard Your Private Keys by Investing in Cryptographic Hardware Products

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Want to avoid the likelihood of your private keys being attacked or compromised? Invest in cryptographic hardware. Why? This prevents private keys from being exposed to cyber criminals.

In addition, if you are transporting private keys, use only randomly generated passwords. These should contain no fewer than 16 characters. They should boast a mix of numbers and lower and uppercase letters. You should also add special characters. Avoid anything personal or self-evident.

Finally, always ensure you invest in a product that is FIPS 140 Level 2-certified or similar.

3. Embrace Time-Stamp Code

• Time-stamping ensures your code is verified even after the certificate has been revoked or it reaches its expiration date.
• When purchasing certification, you can choose different life cycle options. In general, code signing certificates are valid between one and three years.
• For best results, renew your code with the certificate authority (CA) before it expires.

In a nutshell, digitally signing software code is an effective way to ensure that the code you or your clients are about to use has come from a valid source. In addition, it proves it hasn’t been tampered with.

4. Know the Difference Between Release and Test-Signing

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Test-signing private keys requires fewer security measures than private key certificates and production code signing. There are two ways to test-sign certificates. One is to employ the services of an internal test CA, and the other is to self-sign private keys.

Link test certificates to an entirely different root certificate to ensure they are trustworthy and used in the correct environments. This rule should be adopted when signing publicly released products.

For best results when test-signing pre-release builds of software, always employ an alternate test code signing infrastructure.

5. Authenticate and Virus Scan the Code that Needs to be Signed

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Virus scanning and authenticating code is another top tip to embrace when dealing with the management of code signing. Discover more tips below:

• The code that necessitates signing needs authentication before it is released.
• Employ a unique approval process and code signing submission. Why? To prevent a malicious or unapproved code from being signed.
• To ensure you meet incident-response and auditing requirements, log all code-signing activities.
• Code signing does not indicate the quality or safety of the code; it simply confirms whether or not the code has been compromised. In addition, it provides the publisher details.
• Always take the utmost care when adopting code from other sources.
• To heighten the quality of the released code, adopt virus-scanning measures.

To ensure successful code signing management, avoid over-using one key at all costs. Instead, multiple certificates should be adopted to distribute the risk.

In addition, invest in tools such as User Account Control dialogue boxes to indicate security flaws. You can do this via a revoked prompt by revoking the code signing certificate. One point to note? Revoking the certificate will impact both the good and bad code. To avoid the code being tampered with, alternate certificates and keys.

The Bottom Line

If you discover signed malware or certificates are compromised, you should immediately report them to your certification authority. The certificate will then be revoked. Provided all signed code features a time-stamp, you can select the revocation date before it was compromised. Why? The code signed before the revocation date may not be affected.

If poorly managed, code-signing keys and certificates can rapidly become security problems. These can affect the security of your entire software supply chain. This shouldn’t be overlooked. To put this into perspective, consider that 61% of successful security breaches stem from supply chain vulnerabilities.

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