Sigstore allows software developers to quickly sign and verify the software they release. Many of the bigger projects use hardware-based OpenPGP keys to sign and release. But the steps used to make sure that the end-users are correctly verifying those signatures are long, and people make mistakes. Also, not every project has access to hardware smartcards, air-gapped private keys etc. Sigstore solves (or at least makes it way easier) these steps for most developers. It uses existing known (right now only 3) big OIDC providers using which one can sign and verify any data/software.

For this blog post, I will use the python tool called sigstore-python.

The first step is to create a virtual environment and then install the tool.

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ python -m pip install -r install/requirements.txt

Next, we create a file called message.txt with the data. This can be our actual release source code tarball.

$ echo "Kushal loves Python!" > message.txt

Signing the data

The next step is to actually sign the file.

$ python -m sigstore sign message.txt 
Waiting for browser interaction...
Using ephemeral certificate:
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Transparency log entry created at index: 2844439
Signature written to file message.txt.sig
Certificate written to file message.txt.crt

The command will open up the default browser, and we will have the choice to select one of the 3 following OIDC providers.

This will also create message.txt.crt & message.txt.sig files in the same directory.

We can use the openssl command to see the contents of the certificate file.

$ openssl x509 -in message.txt.crt -noout -text
Certificate:
    Data:
        Version: 3 (0x2)
        Serial Number:
            3a:c4:2d:19:20:f0:bf:85:37:a6:01:0f:49:d1:b6:39:20:06:fd:77
        Signature Algorithm: ecdsa-with-SHA384
        Issuer: O = sigstore.dev, CN = sigstore-intermediate
        Validity
            Not Before: Jul  5 14:45:23 2022 GMT
            Not After : Jul  5 14:55:23 2022 GMT
        Subject: 
        Subject Public Key Info:
            Public Key Algorithm: id-ecPublicKey
                Public-Key: (384 bit)
                pub:
                    04:12:aa:88:fd:c7:1f:9e:62:78:46:2a:48:63:d3:
                    b6:92:8b:51:a4:eb:59:18:fb:18:a0:13:54:ac:d0:
                    a4:d8:20:ab:a3:f3:5e:f5:86:aa:34:9b:30:db:59:
                    1b:5c:3d:29:b1:5a:40:ff:55:2c:26:fc:42:58:95:
                    53:d6:23:e5:66:90:3c:32:8c:82:b7:fc:fd:f8:28:
                    2b:53:2d:5c:cb:df:2f:17:d0:f3:bc:26:d2:42:3d:
                    c0:b1:55:61:50:ff:18
                ASN1 OID: secp384r1
                NIST CURVE: P-384
        X509v3 extensions:
            X509v3 Key Usage: critical
                Digital Signature
            X509v3 Extended Key Usage: 
                Code Signing
            X509v3 Subject Key Identifier: 
                6C:F0:C0:63:B8:3D:BB:08:90:C3:03:45:FF:55:92:43:7D:47:19:38
            X509v3 Authority Key Identifier: 
                DF:D3:E9:CF:56:24:11:96:F9:A8:D8:E9:28:55:A2:C6:2E:18:64:3F
            X509v3 Subject Alternative Name: critical
                email:mail@kushaldas.in
            1.3.6.1.4.1.57264.1.1: 
                https://github.com/login/oauth
            CT Precertificate SCTs: 
                Signed Certificate Timestamp:
                    Version   : v1 (0x0)
                    Log ID    : 08:60:92:F0:28:52:FF:68:45:D1:D1:6B:27:84:9C:45:
                                67:18:AC:16:3D:C3:38:D2:6D:E6:BC:22:06:36:6F:72
                    Timestamp : Jul  5 14:45:23.112 2022 GMT
                    Extensions: none
                    Signature : ecdsa-with-SHA256
                                30:46:02:21:00:AB:A6:ED:59:3E:B7:C4:79:11:6A:92:
                                29:92:BF:54:45:6A:B6:1F:6F:1C:63:7C:D9:89:26:D4:
                                6B:EF:E3:3E:9F:02:21:00:AD:87:A7:BA:BA:7C:61:D2:
                                53:34:E0:D0:C4:BF:6A:6E:28:B4:02:82:AA:F8:FD:0B:
                                FB:3A:CD:B9:33:3D:F4:36
    Signature Algorithm: ecdsa-with-SHA384
    Signature Value:
        30:65:02:30:17:89:76:ef:a1:0e:97:5b:a3:fe:c0:34:13:36:
        3f:6f:2a:ba:e9:cd:bd:f2:74:d9:8c:13:2a:88:c9:96:b2:72:
        de:34:44:95:41:f8:b0:69:5b:f0:86:a7:05:cf:81:7f:02:31:
        00:d8:3a:12:89:39:4b:2c:ad:ff:5a:23:85:d9:c0:73:f0:b1:
        db:5c:65:f9:5d:ee:7a:bb:b8:08:01:44:7a:2e:9f:ba:2b:4b:
        df:6a:93:08:e9:44:2c:23:88:66:2c:f7:8f

Verifying the signature

We can verify the signature, just make sure that the certificate & signature files are in the same directory.

$ python -m sigstore verify message.txt 
OK: message.txt

Now, to test this with some real software releases, we will download the cosign RPM package and related certificate & signature files. The certificate in this case, is base64 encoded, so we decode that file first.

$ curl -sOL https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v1.9.0/cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm
$ curl -sOL https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v1.9.0/cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm-keyless.sig
$ curl -sOL https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v1.9.0/cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm-keyless.pem
$ base64 -d cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm-keyless.pem > cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm.pem

Now let us verify the downloaded RPM package along with the email address and signing OIDC issuer URL. We are also printing the debug statements, so that we can see what is actually happening for verification.

$ SIGSTORE_LOGLEVEL=debug python -m sigstore verify --certificate cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm.pem --signature cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm-keyless.sig --cert-email keyless@projectsigstore.iam.gserviceaccount.com --cert-oidc-issuer https://accounts.google.com  cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm

DEBUG:sigstore._cli:parsed arguments Namespace(subcommand='verify', certificate=PosixPath('cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm.pem'), signature=PosixPath('cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm-keyless.sig'), cert_email='keyless@projectsigstore.iam.gserviceaccount.com', cert_oidc_issuer='https://accounts.google.com', rekor_url='https://rekor.sigstore.dev', staging=False, files=[PosixPath('cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm')])
DEBUG:sigstore._cli:Using certificate from: cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm.pem
DEBUG:sigstore._cli:Using signature from: cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm-keyless.sig
DEBUG:sigstore._cli:Verifying contents from: cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm
DEBUG:sigstore._verify:Successfully verified signing certificate validity...
DEBUG:sigstore._verify:Successfully verified signature...
DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:Starting new HTTPS connection (1): rekor.sigstore.dev:443
DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:https://rekor.sigstore.dev:443 "POST /api/v1/index/retrieve/ HTTP/1.1" 200 69
DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:https://rekor.sigstore.dev:443 "GET /api/v1/log/entries/9ee91f2c5444e4ff77a3a18885f46fa2b6f7e629450904d67b5920333327b90d HTTP/1.1" 200 None
DEBUG:sigstore._verify:Successfully verified Rekor entry...
OK: cosign-1.9.0.x86_64.rpm

Oh, one more important thing. The maintainers of the tool are amazing about feedback. I had some trouble initially (a few weeks ago). They sat down with me to make sure that they could understand the problem & also solved the issue I had. You can talk to the team (and other users, including me) in the slack room.

Last week I attended OAuth Security Workshop at Trondheim, Norway. It was a 3-day single-track conference, where the first half of the days were pre-selected talks, and the second parts were unconference talks/side meetings. This was also my first proper conference after COVID emerged in the world.

Back to the starting line

After many years felt the whole excitement of being a total newbie in something and suddenly being able to meet all the people behind the ideas. I reached the conference hotel in the afternoon of day 0 and met the organizers as they were in the lobby area. That chat went on for a long, and as more and more people kept checking into the hotel, I realized that it was a kind of reunion for many of the participants. Though a few of them met at a conference in California just a week ago, they all were excited to meet again.

To understand how welcoming any community is, just notice how the community behaves towards new folks. I think the Python community stands high in this regard. And I am very happy to say the whole OAuth/OIDC/Identity-related community folks are excellent in this regard. Even though I kept introducing myself as the new person in this identity land, not even for a single time I felt unwelcome. I attended OpenID-related working group meetings during the conference, multiple hallway chats, or talked to people while walking around the beautiful city. Everyone was happy to explain things in detail to me. Even though most of the people there have already spent 5-15+ years in the identity world.

The talks & meetings

What happens in Trondheim, stays in Trondheim.

I generally do not attend many talks at conferences, as they get recorded. But here, the conference was a single track, and also, there were no recordings.

The first talk was related to formal verification, and this was the first time I saw those (scary in my mind) maths on the big screen. But, full credit to the speakers as they explained things in such a way so that even an average programmer like me understood each step. And after this talk, we jumped into the world of OAuth/OpenID. One funny thing was whenever someone mentioned some RFC number, we found the authors inside the meeting room.

In the second half, we had the GNAP master class from Justin Richer. And once again, the speaker straightforwardly explained such deep technical details so that everyone in the room could understand it.

Now, in the evening before, a few times, people mentioned that in heated technical details, many RFC numbers will be thrown at each other, though it was not that many for me to get too scared :)

I also managed to meet Roland for the first time. We had longer chats about the status of Python in the identity ecosystem and also about Identity Python. I took some notes about how we can improve the usage of Python in this, and I will most probably start writing about those in the coming weeks.

In multiple talks, researchers & people from the industry pointed out the mistakes made in the space from the security point of view. Even though, for many things, we have clear instructions in the SPECs, there is no guarantee that the implementors will follow them properly, thus causing security gaps.

At the end of day 1, we had a special Organ concert at the beautiful Trondheim Cathedral. On day 2, we had a special talk, “The Viking Kings of Norway”.

If you let me talk about my experience at the conference, I don’t think I will stop before 2 hours. It was so much excitement, new information, the whole feeling of going back into my starting days where I knew nothing much. Every discussion was full of learning opportunities (all discussions are anyway, but being a newbie is a different level of excitement) or the sadness of leaving Anwesha & Py back in Stockholm. This was the first time I was staying away from them after moving to Sweden.

Just before the conference ended, Aaron Parecki gave me a surprise gift. I spent time with it during the whole flight back to Stockholm.

This conference had the best food experience of my life for a conference. Starting from breakfast to lunch, big snack tables, dinners, or restaurant foods. In front of me, at least 4 people during the conference said, “oh, it feels like we are only eating and sometimes talking”.

Another thing I really loved to see is that the two primary conference organizers are university roommates who are continuing the friendship and journey in a very beautiful way. After midnight, standing outside of the hotel and talking about random things about life and just being able to see two longtime friends excited about similar things, it felt so nice.

I also want to thank the whole organizing team, including local organizers, Steinar, and the rest of the team did a superb job.