Sigstore: Making sure your software is what it claims to be

Has anyone implemented this end-to-end? This seems production ready for smaller shops where it's feasible for developers to sign artifacts individually. For a system where you'd want CI to publish artifacts, and then use the k8s policy controller to only run verified artifacts, it seems incomplete.

It appears the reason to include this system in a toolchain would be to meet compliance requirements, but even the GCP, AWS, and Azure implementations of artifact signing & verification are in beta.

It sounds neat, but I am uncomfortable with a central CA (Fulcio) and central log (Rekor). And I trust OIDC providers about as far as I can throw them. Granted, the whole point of a central audit log is to make misbehaviour apparent, but it still strikes me as the wrong direction.

I don’t have a useful proposal for a decentralised version, so I’m just kvetching at this point.

Also, neither X.509 nor JSON is great. We can do better. We should do better.

Somewhat adjacent question: are there people working on ways to verify that a particular server or API backend are running the specific signed release that is open sourced? Can a company somehow cryptographically prove to its users that the running build is derived from the source unmodified?

JSR supports sigstore https://jsr.io/docs/trust

Does this help when a project change ownership or in cases like the xz backdoor?

It seems really difficult to actually use it. For instance, a standard linux distro probably has thousands of packages, components, etc. How can you verify all of them? Even if you can, does it defend against attacks like xz where the trusted source itself is compromised