Cosign malicious artifacts can cause machine-wide DoS
Date: 2024-04
Affected: go/github.com/sigstore/cosign/v2, go/github.com/sigstore/cosign
Attack vector: dos
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Medium
CVE: CVE-2024-29903
CWE: CWE-770
CVSS: 4.2 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H)

Maliciously-crafted software artifacts can cause denial of service of the machine running Cosign, thereby impacting all services on the machine. The root cause is that Cosign creates slices based on the number of signatures, manifests or attestations in untrusted artifacts. As such, the untrusted artifact can control the amount of memory that Cosign allocates. As an example, these lines demonstrate the problem: https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/blob/286a98a4a99c1b2f32f84b0d560e324100312280/pkg/oci/remote/signatures.go#L56-L70 This `Get()` method gets the manifest of the image, allocates a slice equal to the length of the layers in the manifest, loops through the layers and adds a new signature to the slice. The exact issue is Cosign allocates excessive memory on the lines that creates a slice of the same length as the manifests. ## Remediation Update to the latest version of Cosign, where the number of attestations, signatures and manifests has been limited to a reasonable value. ## Cosign PoC In the case of this API (also referenced above): https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/blob/286a98a4a99c1b2f32f84b0d560e324100312280/pkg/oci/remote/signatures.go#L56-L70 … The first line can contain a length that is safe for the system and will not throw a runtime panic or be blocked by other safety mechanisms. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the length of `m, err := s.Manifest()` is the max allowed (by the machine without throwing OOM panics) manifests minus 1. Whe


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):