notation-go has excessive memory allocation on verification

Impact

notation-go users will find their application using excessive memory when verifying signatures and the application will be finally killed, and thus availability is impacted.

Patches

The problem has been patched in the release v1.0.0-rc.3. Users should upgrade their notation-go packages to v1.0.0-rc.3 or above.

Workarounds

Users can review their own trust policy file and check if the identity string contains =#. Meanwhile, users should only put trusted certificates in their trust stores referenced by their own trust policy files, and make sure the authenticity validation is set to enforce

Credits

The notation-go project would like to thank Adam Korczynski (@AdamKorcz) for responsibly disclosing this issue during a security fuzzing audit sponsored by CNCF and Shiwei Zhang (@shizhMSFT) for root cause analysis and detailed vulnerability report.

References

• Resource exhaustion attacks