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`OCIRepository`/cosign verification: support TSA-only trusted roots (no transparency log) for private Sigstore instances like GitHub Artifact Attestations

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@stealthybox is already working on this.

Since May 26, 2026.

  • #2062 by @stealthybox — open

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
go
Domain
backend-api-design, security

Research direction

Start with internal/oci/cosign/cosign.go and NewCosignVerifier, then locate OCIRepositoryVerification and its trusted-root handling. Verify the proposed explicit TSA-only option accepts roots with no tlogs while preserving certificate identity checks, and run or extend the repository’s existing verification coverage to confirm both successful and rejected identities.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area/oci area/security enhancement

(generated with claude sonnet 5)

Summary

OCIRepository.spec.verify.trustedRootSecretRef currently requires the supplied trusted_root.json to contain at least one transparency-log (Rekor) entry, and the underlying verification also requires at least one Certificate Transparency SCT on the signing certificate. Both requirements are hard-coded with no way to opt out via the CRD, even though the sigstore/cosign library that Flux already depends on fully supports skipping both checks in favor of RFC 3161 timestamp-only verification (CheckOpts.IgnoreTlog + CheckOpts.UseSignedTimestamps + CheckOpts.IgnoreSCT, exposed on the cosign CLI as --insecure-ignore-tlog --use-signed-timestamps --insecure-ignore-sct).

This makes it impossible to verify artifacts signed by private/enterprise Sigstore instances that don't operate a public transparency log or CT log by design — for example, GitHub's private Sigstore instance used for Artifact Attestations on private/internal repositories. GitHub explicitly does not log these to any transparency log (that's the entire point of the private instance — avoiding leaking private repo/workflow metadata into a public, permanent record), and substitutes an embedded RFC 3161 timestamp instead.

Current behavior

internal/oci/cosign/cosign.go, NewCosignVerifier:

rekorURL, err := rekorURLFromTrustedRoot(customRoot)
if err != nil {
    return nil, fmt.Errorf("unable to extract Rekor URL from trusted root: %w", err)
}

If the supplied trusted root has zero tlogs entries, verifier construction fails outright before any signature/attestation checking is attempted.

Separately, even once past that, verification of a bundle with no CT-logged certificate fails with:

failed to verify signed certificate timestamp: only able to verify 0 SCT entries; unable to meet threshold of 1

Reproduction

  1. Sign/attest an OCI artifact using a private Sigstore instance whose trusted root has no transparency log (e.g. gh attestation trusted-root's private-instance entry has "tlogs": [] and relies solely on timestampAuthorities).
  2. Configure an OCIRepository with verify.provider: cosign, verify.trustedRootSecretRef pointing at that trusted root, no verify.secretRef.
  3. Reconciliation fails at verifier construction (unable to extract Rekor URL from trusted root: no transparency log entries found in trusted root), before any signature is even checked.

Proposed solution

Add an explicit opt-in to OCIRepositoryVerification (naming to match cosign's own CLI convention), e.g.:

verify:
  provider: cosign
  trustedRootSecretRef:
    name: private-sigstore-trusted-root
  trustedInfrastructure: true   # new field

When set, NewCosignVerifier skips rekorURLFromTrustedRoot/newRekorClient entirely and instead sets:

checkOpts.IgnoreTlog = true
checkOpts.UseSignedTimestamps = true
checkOpts.IgnoreSCT = true

This mirrors cosign's own --private-infrastructure / --insecure-ignore-tlog --use-signed-timestamps --insecure-ignore-sct combination almost exactly, and requires no changes elsewhere — the RFC 3161 timestamp and TSA cert chain needed for verification already flow through the same checkOpts.TrustedMaterial built from the supplied trusted root.

Evidence this works

I prototyped this exact change against a local fluxcd/source-controller checkout (pinned sigstore/cosign/v3 v3.0.6) and verified it end-to-end against a real OCI artifact carrying a real actions/attest@v4-produced Sigstore v3 bundle attestation (discovered via cosign.GetBundles/cosign.VerifyImageAttestations, so this also confirms Flux's existing bundle-discovery path already picks up actions/attest-produced attestations with no other changes needed):

  • Correct matchOIDCIdentity → verification succeeds.
  • Deliberately wrong identity → verification fails closed with a clear certificate-identity-mismatch error, confirming this doesn't weaken identity-based access control, only the transparency-log/CT-log requirement.

Alternatives considered

  • Inferring "TSA-only mode" automatically whenever the supplied trusted root has zero tlogs, rather than an explicit field. I'd lean against this for a real PR — it could silently downgrade security if a trusted root ends up empty due to misconfiguration rather than intentional design, whereas an explicit opt-in makes the tradeoff visible in the OCIRepository spec itself.

Offer

Happy to open a PR for this if the approach (explicit opt-in field, mirroring cosign's own --private-infrastructure naming) sounds reasonable to maintainers.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
285
Forks
259
Avg merge
2d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
16

Getting set up

First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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