CVE-2026-24122 PUBLISHED

Cosign Certificate Chain Expiry Validation Issue Allows Issuing Certificate Expiry to Be Overlooked

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 21.01.2026 Published: 19.02.2026 Updated: 19.02.2026

Cosign provides code signing and transparency for containers and binaries. In versions 3.0.4 and below, an issuing certificate with a validity that expires before the leaf certificate will be considered valid during verification even if the provided timestamp would mean the issuing certificate should be considered expired. When verifying artifact signatures using a certificate, Cosign first verifies the certificate chain using the leaf certificate's "not before" timestamp and later checks expiry of the leaf certificate using either a signed timestamp provided by the Rekor transparency log or from a timestamp authority, or using the current time. The root and all issuing certificates are assumed to be valid during the leaf certificate's validity. There is no impact to users of the public Sigstore infrastructure. This may affect private deployments with customized PKIs. This issue has been fixed in version 3.0.5.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
CVSS Score: 3.7

Product Status

Vendor sigstore
Product cosign
Versions
  • Version < 3.0.5 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-295: Improper Certificate Validation CWE