It has been fun collaborating with the folks from Red Hat and the open source community on this project. Luke Hinds, one of the lead developers on sigstore and Security Engineering Lead at Red Hat says, “I am very excited about sigstore and what this means for improving the security of software supply chains. sigstore is an excellent example of an open source community coming together to collaborate and develop a solution to ease the adoption of software signing in a transparent manner.” We couldn’t agree more.

Mike Malone, the CEO of Smallstep, helped with the overall design of sigstore. He adds, “In less than a generation, open source has grown from a niche community to a critical ecosystem that powers our global economy and institutions of society and culture. We must ensure the security of this ecosystem without undermining the open, decentralized collaboration that makes it work. By building on a clever composition of existing technologies that respect privacy and work at scale, sigstore is the core infrastructure we need to solve this fundamental problem. It’s an ambitious project with potential for global impact. I’m impressed by the rapid progress that’s been made by Google, Red Hat, and Linux Foundation over the past few months, and I’m excited to hear feedback from the broader community.”

While we are happy with the progress that has been made, we know there is still work to be done before this can be widely relied upon. Upcoming plans for sigstore include: hardening the system, adding support for other OpenID Connect providers, updating documentation and responding to community feedback.

Sigstore is in its early days, but we’re really excited about its future. Now is a great time to provide feedback, try out the tooling and get involved with the project as design details are still being refined.