AVID-2026-R1427

Description

Client configured with permissive trust policies susceptible to rollback attack in Notary Project (CVE-2024-23332)

Details

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 An external actor with control of a compromised container registry can provide outdated versions of OCI artifacts, such as Images.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relaxed trust policies (such as permissive instead of strict) to potentially use artifacts with signatures that are no longer valid, making them susceptible to any exploits those artifacts may contain.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.

Reason for inclusion in AVID: The CVE describes a rollback/expiration-related vulnerability in the Notary Project’s artifact signing/verification, a software supply chain issue. Notary is used to secure container images and OCI artifacts, which are commonly deployed in AI pipelines and general-purpose AI systems; thus it affects components that build/package/deploy/run AI software stacks. It is a vulnerability with evidence and mitigations provided. Therefore it satisfies AI-related, GP AI supply chain, security/safety vuln, and sufficiency criteria.

References

• NVD entry
• https://github.com/notaryproject/specifications/security/advisories/GHSA-57wx-m636-g3g8
• https://github.com/notaryproject/specifications/commit/cdabdd1042de2999c685fa5d422a785ded9c983a

Affected or Relevant Artifacts

• Developer: notaryproject
• Deployer: notaryproject
• Artifact Details:

Impact

AVID Taxonomy Categorization

• Risk domains: Security
• SEP subcategories: S0100: Software Vulnerability
• Lifecycle stages: L06: Deployment

CVSS

CWE

Other information

• Report Type: Advisory
• Credits:
• Date Reported: 2024-01-19
• Version: 0.3.3
• AVID Entry