| > What makes you think this? The docs I linked and quoted, written by your own organization and helpfully pasted into the point I made? I'm glad to see it's possible (if cumbersome), but I ruled Docker out for this purpose based on the exact link I just pasted. I also followed up and didn't see a "hey, you can sign private registries" bullet in your blog post responding to this paper, or much of anywhere, and Googling "docker sign private registries" doesn't go anywhere. I'm still unsure why I'd stand up several daemons to accomplish signing a file, but that's a side point. ---- ETA: I can no longer reply because I've burned my precious HN comment budget commenting upon this paper (sorry, blame HN), so here's what I would reply to you downthread: > 1. We have to host the signatures somewhere, so we host them in a store we call the notary server. We've had this solved for a long time with .asc files, and Docker is already shipping an HTTP server or six. Shit, extend the Docker format and put the signature on each layer. There's a lot of prior art from RPM and dpkg in particular on how this can be done without writing yet another Docker daemon to run. I'm sorry, I have to call bullshit, here. Docker is a very strong daemon-for-everything engineering culture, and that's the only reason it exists. It's also why folks are competing with you, because there are three or four different daemons in the Docker ecosystem that simply should not exist. Including dockerd. > Think serving an outdated container with known-vulnerable software. Sadly, most artifact signing systems do not mitigate this attack today, Because it's out of scope of a signature. That is conflating a signature with content revocation, which is a different problem altogether. A signature is an attestation of certain properties of data, and "is no longer valid content because circumstances changed after it was signed" is not one of them. The validity of the content is orthogonal to its signature. That known-vulnerable container is still a valid signature, and it's overreaching to expect a signature system to solve that problem. That is solvable in other ways. Known-bad OpenSSL is still signed in repositories. And valid. And that's fine, because it's a separation of concerns; you get non-repudiation, integrity, all that stuff from a signature scheme. Upgrading to gatekeeping content on top of signatures indicates to me a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem ("can I run this?" instead of "this is an authenticated, intact image that came from where I expect"), which concerns me. You can solve the problem you present in other ways. Mixing in the term "replay attack" is extremely confusing and I think diluting your point, because it is baffling me and really does not apply to what you are saying. |
Most of your points are a criticism of TUF, of which Notary and Docker Content Trust are an implementation. Based on your comments I believe you're not familiar with TUF and the scope of problems it solves. Here's a good resource to learn more about it: https://theupdateframework.github.io
You clearly are not a fan of Docker and I respect your opinion, I don't really want to engage in that aspect of the discussion. Now, on the specific topic of secure content distribution, I hope you won't let your bias against Docker get in the way of understanding the benefits of TUF. It does improve the state of the art in secure content distribution, and you should really take the time to understand it and perhaps revisit some of your opinions. We're leveraging it in Docker and sharing our implementation, but you don't have to use Docker to use Notary or TUF.
If after reading about TUF you have specific criticism of it, I would be interested to hear about it.