cert-manager continues to grow as a pioneering open-source project that has grown to become a vital solution with the cloud native ecosystem. Recently, the cert-manager project embarked on a crucial phase of its development journey towards CNCF graduation, underlining Venafi’s commitment to security and reliability for cert-manager’s vast user base. This post delves into the comprehensive Cloud Computing Foundation (CNCF) security audit of cert-manager, a milestone that not only highlights the project's dedication to excellence but also Venafi's instrumental role in its ongoing success.
The audit: A step towards CNCF graduation
In late 2023, cert-manager initiated a security audit, a significant step towards achieving "graduated" status within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This audit, sponsored by the CNCF and meticulously carried out by the adept team at Ada Logics [https://adalogics.com/], was aimed at evaluating cert-manager’s code quality, development and release practices, and dependencies. Furthermore, the integration of cert-manager into Google's OSS-Fuzz [https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz ] project as part of the audit underscores a proactive approach to maintaining robustness against potential vulnerabilities.
The scope of the audit was comprehensive, assessing threats from various actors including contributors, users on the clusters where cert-manager is deployed, and external users interacting with cert-manager over the internet. The thorough evaluation led to the identification of 8 issues, categorized into low severity, moderate severity, and informational, all of which have been promptly addressed, ensuring cert-manager's resilience and reliability.
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Venafi: Behind the scenes
Venafi's involvement in this pivotal phase of cert-manager's journey is important. As the company behind cert-manager’s continues adoption and success, Venafi sponsored maintainer time to meticulously address and rectify the findings from the audit. This collaboration underlines Venafi's commitment to fostering a secure digital ecosystem and highlights its important role in advancing the cert-manager project.
Venafi's sponsorship was instrumental in not only resolving the audit findings but also in paving the way for cert-manager's progression towards graduation within the CNCF. This partnership reflects a shared vision of enhancing digital trust and security across cloud-native environments.
Moving forward
The security audit marks a significant milestone for cert-manager, demonstrating its maturity and readiness to meet the stringent security standards of today's digital landscape. The removal of three dependencies based on the OpenSSF Scorecard's [https://github.com/ossf/scorecard] findings and the implementation of a strategy for evaluating new dependencies are steps that further attest to the project's commitment to security and reliability. The full findings and scoring for dependencies can be found on the full report.
As cert-manager continues on its path to graduation, the collaboration with the CNCF, the guidance from Ada Logics, Venafi is committed to ensuring the project’s continued success. Together, these efforts signify a promising future for cert-manager, one where it continues to play a crucial role in securing cloud-native ecosystems.
A bright future for cert-manager
In conclusion, the cert-manager project, with the backing of Venafi, is setting a precedent for open-source security practices. As we look forward to the project's continued evolution and its eventual graduation from the CNCF, it's clear that the commitment to security, collaboration, and open-source values remains at the heart of its mission. Venafi is proud to be a part of this journey, reinforcing our commitment to enhancing cybersecurity and digital trust across the globe.