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MEDIUM

Possible endless data attack from attacker-controlled registry in cosign

Published Nov 7, 2023

Description

Cosign is a sigstore signing tool for OCI containers. Cosign is susceptible to a denial of service by an attacker controlled registry. An attacker who controls a remote registry can return a high number of attestations and/or signatures to Cosign and cause Cosign to enter a long loop resulting in an endless data attack. The root cause is that Cosign loops through all attestations fetched from the remote registry in pkg/cosign.FetchAttestations. The attacker needs to compromise the registry or make a request to a registry they control. When doing so, the attacker must return a high number of attestations in the response to Cosign. The result will be that the attacker can cause Cosign to go into a long or infinite loop that will prevent other users from verifying their data. In Kyvernos case, an attacker whose privileges are limited to making requests to the cluster can make a request with an image reference to their own registry, trigger the infinite loop and deny other users from completing their admission requests. Alternatively, the attacker can obtain control of the registry used by an organization and return a high number of attestations instead the expected number of attestations. The issue can be mitigated rather simply by setting a limit to the limit of attestations that Cosign will loop through. The limit does not need to be high to be within the vast majority of use cases and still prevent the endless data attack. This issue has been patched in version 2.2.1 and users are advised to upgrade.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

The security flaw identified in the cosign package is considered a low-severity issue due to its limited impact and specific conditions required for exploitation. The vulnerability triggers an infinite loop condition, resulting in a denial of service. However, the flaw does not lead to unauthorized access, data exposure, or compromise of critical business processes. Additionally, it does not involve remote code execution and can be mitigated without causing significant long-term impact on the system's security.

Red Hat mitigation

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options don't meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.

References (11)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner GitHub_M
Published Nov 7, 2023
Updated Sep 4, 2024
Reserved Oct 25, 2023
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Sep 4, 2024
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Low
Public date Nov 7, 2023
ENISA EUVD
Assigner GitHub_M
Published Nov 7, 2023
Updated Sep 4, 2024
Exploited since n/a
EUVD-2023-3044 GHSA-VFP6-JRW2-99G9