CVE-2023-33957: Denial of service from high number of artifact signatures in notation

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.7 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-06-06 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

notation is a CLI tool to sign and verify OCI artifacts and container images. An attacker who has compromised a registry and added a high number of signatures to an artifact can cause denial of service of services on the machine, if a user runs notation inspect command on the same machine. The problem has been fixed in the release v1.0.0-rc.6. Users should upgrade their notation packages to v1.0.0-rc.6 or above. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade may restrict container registries to a set of secure and trusted container registries.

Affected products

notaryproject notation-go: before 1.0.0; 1.0.0-rc1, 1.0.0-rc2, 1.0.0-rc3, 1.0.0-rc4, 1.0.0-rc5 — fixed in 1.0.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: notaryproject notation-go 1.0.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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