syft VS cosign

Syft is a popular open source CLI tool created by Anchore for generating an SBOM from container images and filesystems. It’s designed to provide a catalog of dependencies for other tools to use as a data source. It supports many popular programming languages, package managers, and container image formats.

I'm curious to hear what tools folks are using for generating software bill of materials (SBOMs) today? We're huge fans of the Syft project: https://github.com/anchore/syft

Inside of the SBOMs, we can detect a lot: https://github.com/anchore/syft#supported-ecosystems

You're right that the active/dormant detection needs to be customized per type of runtime. We cover rpm/deb, python and java with the node and others coming very soon. The compiled languages will be our main focus next. For example, Go binaries embed some dependency metadata in the binary itself.

Also related to this effort is the "in-toto" integrity chain: https://in-toto.io/in-toto/ Since we're already connecting build to run, we aim to complete the chain.

The data format is supported by cargo audit, Syft and Trivy. Reading it from your own tools is also very easy.

A Software-Bill-of-Materials (SBOM) lists all the software components included in an image. Buildpacks support SBOMs in CycloneDX, Syft and SPDX formats.

I think you can already do that using Syft.

I'll continue relying on Anitya for the feed and syft/grype to build my SBOM and track vulnerabilities.

Today corporations, open source projects, nonprofit foundations, and even governments are all trying to figure out how to improve the global software supply chain security. While these efforts are more than welcome, for the moment, there is hardly any straightforward way for organizations to improve on that front.

For example, let's see how the DevSecOps process can detect and prevent zero-day vulnerabilities like log4j. Using Syft tool, we can generate SBOM for our application code and pass this SBOM report to Grype which can detect these new vulnerabilities and report to us if there is any fix or patch available. As these steps are part of our CI/CD, we can alert our developers and security team to remediate this issue as soon as it is identified.

Cosign: In this context, Cosign from the Sigstore project offers a compelling solution. Its simplicity, registry compatibility, and effective link between images and their signatures provide a user-friendly and versatile approach. The integration of Fulcio for certificate management and Rekor for secure logging enhances Cosign's appeal, making it particularly suitable for modern development environments that prioritize security and agility.

sigstore is another suite of tools that focuses on attestation and provenance. Within the suite are two tools I heard mentioned a few times at KubeCon: Cosign and Rekor.

Since we can distribute Spin applications using popular registry services, we can also take advantage of ecosystem tools such as Sigstore and Cosign, which address the software supply chain issue by signing and verifying applications using Sigstore's new keyless signatures (using OIDC identity tokens from providers such as GitHub).

Use distroless images (which contain only application and its runtime dependencies, and don't include package managers/shells or any other programs you would expect to find in a standard Linux distribution). All distroless images are signed by cosign.

$ COSIGN_EXPERIMENTAL=1 cosign verify-blob --cert https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v1.13.1/cosign-linux-amd64-keyless.pem --signature https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v1.13.1/cosign-linux-amd64-keyless.sig https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v1.13.1/cosign-linux-amd64

Another thing to look for is, whether the image is signed using something like cosign (https://github.com/sigstore/cosign). This lets the publisher digitally sign the image, so you at least know that what's on the registry is what they intended to put there. Handy to avoid the risks of attackers squatting similar names and catching typos.

name: Docker # This workflow uses actions that are not certified by GitHub. # They are provided by a third-party and are governed by # separate terms of service, privacy policy, and support # documentation. on: push: branches: [ "main" ] # Publish semver tags as releases. tags: [ 'v*.*.*' ] pull_request: branches: [ "main" ] paths: - src/MamisSolidarias.WebAPI.Campaigns/Dockerfile - .github/workflows/docker-publish.yml workflow_dispatch: env: # Use docker.io for Docker Hub if empty REGISTRY: ghcr.io IMAGE_NAME: mamis-solidarias/campaigns jobs: build: runs-on: ubuntu-latest permissions: contents: read packages: write # This is used to complete the identity challenge # with sigstore/fulcio when running outside of PRs. id-token: write steps: - name: Checkout repository uses: actions/checkout@v3 # Install the cosign tool except on PR # https://github.com/sigstore/cosign-installer - name: Install cosign if: github.event_name != 'pull_request' uses: sigstore/cosign-installer@main with: cosign-release: 'v1.13.1' - name: Set up QEMU uses: docker/setup-qemu-action@v2 with: platforms: 'arm64' # Workaround: https://github.com/docker/build-push-action/issues/461 - name: Setup Docker buildx uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v2 # Login against a Docker registry except on PR # https://github.com/docker/login-action - name: Log into registry ${{ env.REGISTRY }} if: github.event_name != 'pull_request' uses: docker/login-action@v2 with: registry: ${{ env.REGISTRY }} username: ${{ github.actor }} password: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} # Extract metadata (tags, labels) for Docker # https://github.com/docker/metadata-action - name: Extract Docker metadata id: meta uses: docker/metadata-action@v4 with: images: ${{ env.REGISTRY }}/${{ env.IMAGE_NAME }} tags: | type=schedule type=ref,event=branch type=ref,event=pr type=semver,pattern={{version}} type=semver,pattern={{major}}.{{minor}} type=semver,pattern={{major}} type=sha # Build and push Docker image with Buildx (don't push on PR) # https://github.com/docker/build-push-action - name: Build and push Docker image id: build-and-push uses: docker/build-push-action@v3 with: context: . platforms: linux/amd64, linux/arm64 file: src/MamisSolidarias.WebAPI.Campaigns/Dockerfile push: ${{ github.event_name != 'pull_request' }} tags: ${{ steps.meta.outputs.tags }} labels: ${{ steps.meta.outputs.labels }} # Sign the resulting Docker image digest except on PRs. # This will only write to the public Rekor transparency log when the Docker # repository is public to avoid leaking data. If you would like to publish # transparency data even for private images, pass --force to cosign below. # https://github.com/sigstore/cosign - name: Sign the published Docker image if: ${{ github.event_name != 'pull_request' }} env: COSIGN_EXPERIMENTAL: "true" # This step uses the identity token to provision an ephemeral certificate # against the sigstore community Fulcio instance. run: echo "${{ steps.meta.outputs.tags }}" | xargs -I {} cosign sign {}@${{ steps.build-and-push.outputs.digest }}

After inspecting the layers i think you should start thinking about signing your images: https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/

cosign