notation-go's verification bypass can cause users to verify the wrong artifact

HIGH 8.8CVE-2023-33959 · GHSA-xhg5-42rf-296r · GO-2023-1832 · Published 06/06/2023 · updated 17/06/2026

In short

CVE-2023-33959 is a HIGH (CVSS 8.8) vulnerability affecting github.com/notaryproject/notation-go, notation-go (notaryproject).
Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days (EPSS): 0.35%, higher than 29.3% of all vulnerabilities.
Fix: update to 1.0.0-rc.6, 1.0.0 or later.

Package	Affected versions	Patched versions
github.com/notaryproject/notation-go Go	`< 1.0.0-rc.6`	`1.0.0-rc.6`
notation-go notaryproject	`= 1.0.0< 1.0.0`	`1.0.0`

Description

Impact

An attacker who controls or compromises a registry can lead a user to verify the wrong artifact.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in the release v1.0.0-rc.6. Users should upgrade their notation-go library to v1.0.0-rc.6 or above.

Workarounds

User should use secure and trusted container registries.

Credits

The notation project would like to thank Adam Korczynski (@AdamKorcz) for responsibly disclosing the issue found during an security audit (facilitated by OSTIF and sponsored by CNCF) and Shiwei Zhang (@shizhMSFT), Pritesh Bandi (@priteshbandi) for root cause analysis.

NVD description

notation is a CLI tool to sign and verify OCI artifacts and container images. An attacker who has compromised a registry can cause users to verify the wrong artifact. The problem has been fixed in the release v1.0.0-rc.6. Users should upgrade their notation-go library to v1.0.0-rc.6 or above. Users unable to upgrade may restrict container registries to a set of secure and trusted container registries.