Notary v2 Project Update

Supply chain security is something that has been increasingly important to all of us in the last few years. Almost as important as the global supply chains that are having problems distributing goods around the world! There have been many attacks via the supply chain. This is where some piece of software that you use turns out to be compromised or to contain vulnerabilities that in turn compromises your production environment.

We have written about secure supply chain best practices . Docker is committed to helping you build security into your supply chain, and we are working on more tools to help you with this. We provide Docker Trusted Content, including Docker Official Images and Docker Verified Publisher images for you to use as a  trusted starting point for building your applications.

We have also been heavily involved with many community projects around supply chain security. In particular we are heavily involved in the Notary v2 project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). We last wrote about this in January. This project is the next generation of the original Notary project that Docker started in 2015 and then donated to the CNCF. Notary (to simplify!) is a project for adding cryptographic signatures to container images so that you can make sure that the image someone produced is the same one that you are using, and that it has not been tampered with on the way.

Over the years we have learned a lot of things about how it is used, and the problems that have hindered wider adoption, and these are part of the community feedback into the design of Notary v2. We are looking to build a signing framework that can be used in every registry, and where signatures can be pushed and pulled with images so that you can identify that an image that you pull from your private on premise registry is the same as the Docker Official Image on Docker Hub, for example. This is one of the many use cases that are important to the community and which Notary v1 did not adequately address. We also want to make it much simpler to use, so we can have signature checks on by default for all users, rather than having opt-in signatures.

Today the project has released an early alpha prototype for further experimentation and for your feedback. Steve Lasker has written a blog post with the details. Check out the demos and please give feedback on whether these workflows fit your use cases, or how we can improve them.

Remember you can give us feedback about any aspect of our products on the Docker public roadmap. We are especially interested in your feedback around supply chain security and what you would like to see; we have had lots of really helpful feedback recently that is helping us work out where to take our products and tools.