The Notary Project is a set of specifications and tools intended to provide a cross-industry standard for securing software supply chains by using authentic container images and other OCI artifacts. An external actor with control of a compromised container registry can provide outdated versions of OCI artifacts, such as Images. This could lead artifact consumers with relaxed trust policies (such as `permissive` instead of `strict`) to potentially use artifacts with signatures that are no longer valid, making them susceptible to any exploits those artifacts may contain. In Notary Project, an artifact publisher can control the validity period of artifact by specifying signature expiry during the signing process. Using shorter signature validity periods along with processes to periodically resign artifacts, allows artifact producers to ensure that their consumers will only receive up-to-date artifacts. Artifact consumers should correspondingly use a `strict` or equivalent trust policy that enforces signature expiry. Together these steps enable use of up-to-date artifacts and safeguard against rollback attack in the event of registry compromise. The Notary Project offers various signature validation options such as `permissive`, `audit` and `skip` to support various scenarios. These scenarios includes 1) situations demanding urgent workload deployment, necessitating the bypassing of expired or revoked signatures; 2) auditing of artifacts lacking signatures without interrupting workload; and 3) skipping of verification for specific images that might have undergone validation through alternative mechanisms. Additionally, the Notary Project supports revocation to ensure the signature freshness. Artifact publishers can sign with short-lived certificates and revoke older certificates when necessary. This revocation serves as a signal to inform artifact consumers that the corresponding unexpired artifact is no longer approved by the publisher. This enables the artifact publisher to control the validity of the signature independently of their ability to manage artifacts in a compromised registry.
This vulnerability carries a MEDIUM severity rating with a CVSS v3.1 score of 4.0, indicating it can be exploited remotely over the network but requires specific conditions to be met though user interaction is required . The vulnerability impacts limited integrity, and limited availability for affected systems. Impacting 1 product from notaryproject organizations running these solutions should prioritize assessment and patching.
Reported in 2024, this vulnerability emerged during an era marked by increased sophistication in supply chain attacks, cloud infrastructure vulnerabilities, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) security challenges. Security practices during this period emphasized zero-trust architectures, container security, and API protection.
2024-01-19T23:15:07.930
2024-11-21T08:57:31.710
Modified
CVSSv3.1: 4.0 (MEDIUM)
| Type | Vendor | Product | Version/Range | Vulnerable? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Application | notaryproject | notation-go | * | Yes |
SecUtils normalizes and enriches National Vulnerability Database (NVD) records by standardizing vendor and product identifiers, aggregating vulnerability metadata from both NVD and MITRE sources, and providing structured context for security teams. For notaryproject's affected products, we extract Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) data, Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) classifications, CVSS severity metrics, and reference data to enable rapid vulnerability prioritization and asset correlation. This record contains no exploit code, proof-of-concept instructions, or attack methodologies—only defensive intelligence necessary for patch management, risk assessment, and security operations.