Software signing is widely understood as a security best practice. Most organizations do it. Many do it well. And yet, software signing continues to surface as a contributing factor in post-incident reviews and supply chain failures.

The issue usually isn’t the act of signing itself. It’s everything that surrounds it. 

Signing software at scale introduces a set of operational questions that are easy to underestimate: Who has the authority to sign? What gets signed, and when? How are signing keys protected, rotated, and revoked over time? When those questions don’t have clear, enforceable answers, signing can unintentionally extend trust further than intended. 

I see this pattern often. Organizations have policies, guidelines, and documented processes for software signing. But without strong governance behind them, those controls tend to erode. 

This is where software signing breaks down—not because the technology failed, but because governance didn’t keep up.

Where software signing actually breaks down 

When signing-related issues surface after an incident, they rarely point back to a cryptographic failure. More often, they trace to gaps in process and control that developed over time. 

One common issue is signing software before it’s been properly validated. When vulnerability scanning or build checks are treated as optional—or rushed to meet release deadlines—signing can end up reinforcing trust in software that hasn’t been fully examined. The signature itself becomes a stamp of approval applied too early in the process. 

Key management is another frequent weak spot. Signing keys are powerful assets, but they’re still too often handled like ordinary credentials. Keys get reused across projects, stored in places that weren’t designed to protect them, or left active long after their original purpose has passed. When a key is compromised in those conditions, the blast radius can be far larger than teams expect. 

Access control introduces similar risk. Over time, more people and systems gain the ability to sign software, often without clear limits on what they’re allowed to sign. Offboarding processes lag behind staffing changes. Permissions accumulate. And eventually, organizations lose a reliable answer to a basic question: Who can sign what, right now? 

None of these problems are unusual. They tend to emerge gradually as teams grow, pipelines multiply, and manual controls struggle to keep up. But taken together, they’re exactly how software signing drifts from a trust mechanism into a liability. 

Policy without enforcement doesn’t scale 

The breakdowns in software signing rarely come from a lack of awareness. Most organizations know, at least in principle, how signing should be handled. Policies exist. Standards are documented. Expectations are clearly written down. 

The gap appears when those expectations have to be enforced across real-world environments. 

As development teams grow and CI/CD pipelines multiply, signing decisions become distributed across people, tools, and automated systems. What starts as a controlled process gradually turns into a series of local decisions made under delivery pressure. Exceptions get approved informally. Temporary access lingers. Controls that once felt manageable become hard to apply consistently. 

At that point, governance shifts from being intentional to being implicit. Teams assume the right checks happened upstream. Security teams assume policies are being followed downstream. And because enforcement lives outside the workflow, no one has a complete view of how trust is actually being applied. 

This is why signing failures often surprise organizations after the fact. The policies were there. The intent was there. But without mechanisms to enforce those policies consistently—across teams, projects, and pipelines—governance breaks down. 

Effective software signing governance requires that policies hold up under real-world conditions. As teams scale and delivery accelerates, enforceable controls ensure signing decisions remain consistent, auditable, and aligned with intent rather than convenience. 

What effective signing governance looks like in practice

When software signing governance works, it’s rarely visible day to day. Releases move forward. Pipelines run. Teams don’t have to stop and ask for exceptions. That’s usually a sign the right controls are in place. 

In practice, effective signing governance tends to share a few common characteristics: 

• Clear ownership of signing authority: Organizations can confidently answer who’s allowed to sign software and under what conditions, with signing rights assigned intentionally, reviewed regularly, and tied to defined roles rather than individuals.
• Scoped access instead of blanket permission: Teams and systems are limited to signing only what they’re meant to sign, with keys and certificates scoped to specific products, projects, or pipelines to reduce blast radius. 
• Protected, centrally managed keys: Signing keys are treated as high-value assets, stored in appropriate hardware or managed services, rotated regularly, and kept out of laptops or shared environments.
• Enforceable policies built into the workflow: Signing rules are enforced through systems and automation rather than documentation, so policy violations are blocked by default instead of discovered later.
• Auditability by default: Every signing action can be traced back to a user, system, and point in the pipeline, making investigation and compliance far easier without reconstructing events after the fact.

These practices don’t slow teams down. They remove ambiguity. When governance is designed into the signing process itself, developers spend less time navigating exceptions, and security teams spend less time chasing answers.

Putting signing governance into practice

For many organizations, the challenge isn’t defining what good signing governance looks like. It’s enforcing it consistently across teams, tools, and pipelines. 

DigiCert Software Trust Manager is designed to help organizations operationalize signing governance without adding friction. It centralizes control over signing keys, access, and policies, so rules are enforced through the system rather than relying on manual checks or institutional knowledge. 

By integrating directly into CI/CD workflows, Software Trust Manager allows teams to apply trust intentionally—controlling who can sign, what can be signed, and under what conditions—while maintaining the speed modern development demands. 

Take a product tour of DigiCert Software Trust Manager to see how visibility, policy enforcement, and signing controls come together inside real CI/CD workflows.