PolicyController is a utility used to enforce supply chain policy in Kubernetes clusters. In versions prior to 0.2.1 PolicyController will report a false positive, resulting in an admission when it should not be admitted when there is at least one attestation with a valid signature and there are NO attestations of the type being verified (--type defaults to "custom"). An example image that can be used to test this is ghcr.io/distroless/static@sha256:dd7614b5a12bc4d617b223c588b4e0c833402b8f4991fb5702ea83afad1986e2. Users should upgrade to version 0.2.1 to resolve this issue. There are no workarounds for users unable to upgrade.
Impact
sigstore-go is susceptible to a denial of service attack when a verifier is provided a maliciously crafted Sigstore Bundle containing large amounts of verifiable data, in the form of signed transparency log entries, RFC 3161 timestamps, and attestation subjects. The verification of these data structures is computationally expensive. This can be used to consume excessive CPU resources, leading to a denial of service attack. TUF's security model labels this type of vulnerability an "Endless data attack," and can lead to verification failing to complete and disrupting services that rely on sigstore-go for verification.
The vulnerable loops are in the verification functions in the package github.com/sigstore/sigstore-go/pkg/verify. The first is the DSSE envelope verification loop in verifyEnvelopeWithArtifact, which decodes all the digests in an attestation can be found here:
https://github.com/sigstore/sigstore-go/blob/725e508ed4933e6f5b5206e32af4bbe76f587b54/pkg/verify/signature.go#L183-L193
The next loop is in the VerifyArtifactTransparencyLog function, which verifies all the signed entries in a bundle:
https://github.com/sigstore/sigstore-go/blob/725e508ed4933e6f5b5206e32af4bbe76f587b54/pkg/verify/tlog.go#L74-L178
The next loop is the VerifyTimestampAuthority function, which verifies all the RFC 3161 timestamps in a bundle:
https://github.com/sigstore/sigstore-go/blob/725e508ed4933e6f5b5206e32af4bbe76f587b54/pkg/verify/tsa.go#L59-L68
Patches
This vulnerability is addressed with sigstore-go 0.6.1, which adds hard limits to the number of verifiable data structures that can be processed in a bundle. Verification will fail if a bundle has data that exceeds these limits. The limits are:
- 32 signed transparency log entries - 32 RFC 3161 timestamps - 1024 attestation subjects - 32 digests per attestation subject
These limits are intended to be high enough to accommodate the vast majority of use cases, while preventing the verification of maliciously crafted bundles that contain large amounts of verifiable data.
Workarounds
The best way to mitigate the risk is to upgrade to sigstore-go 0.6.1 or later. Users who are vulnerable but unable to quickly upgrade may consider adding manual bundle validation to enforce limits similar to those in the referenced patch prior to calling sigstore-go's verification functions.
Impact
In certain versions of gitsign, Rekor public keys were fetched via the Rekor API, instead of through the local TUF client. If the upstream Rekor server happened to be compromised, gitsign clients could potentially be tricked into trusting incorrect signatures.
There is no known compromise the default public good instance (rekor.sigstore.dev) - anyone using this instance is unlikely to be affected.
Patches
This was fixed in v0.8.0 via https://github.com/sigstore/gitsign/pull/399
Workarounds
n/a
References Are there any links users can visit to find out more?
https://docs.sigstore.dev/about/threat-model/#sigstore-threat-model