Note
Artifact attestations are in public beta and subject to change.
About artifact attestations
Artifact attestations enable you to create unfalsifiable provenance and integrity guarantees for the software you build. In turn, people who consume your software can verify where and how your software was built.
When you generate artifact attestations with your software, you create cryptographically signed claims that establish your build's provenance and include the following information:
- A link to the workflow associated with the artifact.
- The repository, organization, environment, commit SHA, and triggering event for the artifact.
- Other information from the OIDC token used to establish provenance. For more information, see "About security hardening with OpenID Connect."
You can also generate artifact attestations that include an associated software bill of materials (SBOM). Associating your builds with a list of the open source dependencies used in them provides transparency and enables consumers to comply with data protection standards.
About SLSA levels for artifact attestations
The SLSA framework is an industry standard used to evaluate supply chain security. It is organized into levels. Each level represents an increasing degree of security and trustworthiness for a software supply chain. Artifact attestations provides SLSA v1.0 Build Level 2.
You can use artifact attestations to achieve SLSA v1.0 Build Level 3; however, we strongly recommend first focusing on broad adoption of Build Level 2 across your organization. It is much better to consistently meet Level 2 across your builds than to have a small portion of builds that reach Level 3. To achieve Build Level 3, we recommend standardizing your build process with reusable workflows, auditing the reusable workflows to ensure they meet Level 3 requirements, and then updating your verification policy to require those audited reusable workflows.
For more information, see the Provenance section of the SLSA documentation.
About using Sigstore for artifact attestations
To generate artifact attestations, GitHub uses Sigstore, which is an open source project that offers a comprehensive solution for signing and verifying software artifacts via attestations.
Public repositories that generate artifact attestations use the Sigstore Public Good Instance. A copy of the generated Sigstore bundle is stored with GitHub and is also written to an immutable transparency log that is publicly readable on the internet.
Private repositories that generate artifact attestations use GitHub's Sigstore instance. GitHub's Sigstore instance uses the same codebase as the Sigstore Public Good Instance, but it does not have a transparency log and only federates with GitHub Actions.
About verifying artifact attestations
If you consume software that publishes artifact attestations, you can use the GitHub CLI to verify those attestations. Because the attestations give you information about where and how software was built, you can use that information to create and enforce security policies that elevate your supply chain security. For more information, see "Verifying artifact attestations with the GitHub CLI."
Warning
It is important to remember that artifact attestations are not a guarantee that an artifact is secure. Instead, artifact attestations link you to the source code and the build instructions that produced them. It is up to you to define your policy criteria, evaluate that policy by evaluating the content, and make an informed risk decision when you are consuming software.
Generating artifact attestations for your builds
You can use GitHub Actions to generate artifact attestations that establish build provenance for artifacts such as binaries and container images.
To generate an artifact attestation, you must:
- Ensure you have the appropriate permissions configured in your workflow.
- Include a step in your workflow that uses the
attest-build-provenance
action.
When you run your updated workflows, they will build your artifacts and generate an artifact attestation that establishes build provenance. You can view attestations in your repository's Actions tab. For more information, see the attest-build-provenance
repository.
Generating build provenance for binaries
-
In the workflow that builds the binary you would like to attest, add the following permissions.
permissions: id-token: write contents: read attestations: write
-
After the step where the binary has been built, add the following step.
- name: Generate artifact attestation uses: actions/attest-build-provenance@v1 with: subject-path: 'PATH/TO/ARTIFACT'
The value of the
subject-path
parameter should be set to the path to the binary you want to attest.
Generating build provenance for container images
-
In the workflow that builds the container image you would like to attest, add the following permissions.
permissions: id-token: write contents: read attestations: write packages: write
-
After the step where the image has been built, add the following step.
- name: Generate artifact attestation uses: actions/attest-build-provenance@v1 with: subject-name: ${{ env.REGISTRY }}/${{ env.IMAGE_NAME }} subject-digest: 'sha256:fedcba0...' push-to-registry: true
The value of the
subject-name
parameter should specify the fully-qualified image name. For example,ghcr.io/user/app
oracme.azurecr.io/user/app
. Do not include a tag as part of the image name.The value of the
subject-digest
parameter should be set to the SHA256 digest of the subject for the attestation, in the formsha256:HEX_DIGEST
. If your workflow usesdocker/build-push-action
, you can use thedigest
output from that step to supply the value. For more information on using outputs, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions."
Generating an attestation for a software bill of materials (SBOM)
You can generate signed SBOM attestations for workflow artifacts.
To generate an attestation for an SBOM, you must:
- Ensure you have the appropriate permissions configured in your workflow.
- Create an SBOM for your artifact. For more information, see
anchore-sbom-action
in the GitHub Marketplace. - Include a step in your workflow that uses the
attest-sbom
action.
When you run your updated workflows, they will build your artifacts and generate an SBOM attestation. You can view attestations in your repository's Actions tab. For more information, see the attest-sbom
action repository.
Generating an SBOM attestation for binaries
-
In the workflow that builds the binary you would like to attest, add the following permissions.
permissions: id-token: write contents: read attestations: write
-
After the step where the binary has been built, add the following step.
- name: Generate SBOM attestation uses: actions/attest-sbom@v1 with: subject-path: 'PATH/TO/ARTIFACT' sbom-path: 'PATH/TO/SBOM'
The value of the
subject-path
parameter should be set to the path of the binary the SBOM describes. The value of thesbom-path
parameter should be set to the path of the SBOM file you generated.
Generating an SBOM attestation for container images
-
In the workflow that builds the container image you would like to attest, add the following permissions.
permissions: id-token: write contents: read attestations: write packages: write
-
After the step where the image has been built, add the following step.
- name: Generate SBOM attestation uses: actions/attest-sbom@v1 with: subject-name: ${{ env.REGISTRY }}/PATH/TO/IMAGE subject-digest: 'sha256:fedcba0...' sbom-path: 'sbom.json' push-to-registry: true
The value of the
subject-name
parameter should specify the fully-qualified image name. For example,ghcr.io/user/app
oracme.azurecr.io/user/app
. Do not include a tag as part of the image name.The value of the
subject-digest
parameter should be set to the SHA256 digest of the subject for the attestation, in the formsha256:HEX_DIGEST
. If your workflow usesdocker/build-push-action
, you can use thedigest
output from that step to supply the value. For more information on using outputs, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions."The value of the
sbom-path
parameter should be set to the path to the JSON-formatted SBOM file you want to attest.
Verifying artifact attestations with the GitHub CLI
To verify artifact attestations for binaries, use the following GitHub CLI command.
gh attestation verify PATH/TO/YOUR/BUILD/ARTIFACT-BINARY -R ORGANIZATION_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME
gh attestation verify PATH/TO/YOUR/BUILD/ARTIFACT-BINARY -R ORGANIZATION_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME
To verify artifact attestations for container images, you must provide the image's FQDN prefixed with oci://
instead of the path to a binary. You can use the following GitHub CLI command.
docker login ghcr.io gh attestation verify oci://ghcr.io/ORGANIZATION_NAME/IMAGE_NAME:test -R ORGANIZATION_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME
docker login ghcr.io
gh attestation verify oci://ghcr.io/ORGANIZATION_NAME/IMAGE_NAME:test -R ORGANIZATION_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME
For more information, see the attestation
section of the GitHub CLI manual.