Support publishing externally generated signatures

[jeremyrickard]

What is the areas you would like to add the new feature to?

Notation CLI

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Suppose I have an external/thirdparty signing service that allows me to produce a signature compatible with the Notary spec. Currently, If I want to then "publish" or "attach" that to the container/artifact I am signing, I need to do a few things that currently are handled by the notation client:

1. I need to produce the proper manifest including: artifacts type, referrers/subject, and io.cncf.notary.x509chain.thumbprint#S256 annotation.
2. I then need to use something like oras to attach that to the image and ensure that I am using a proper version (i.e. 0.16.0 or later) and keep the tools in sync

What solution do you propose?

I propose either a plugin or an "attach" command that would allow an externally generated notary compliant signature to be attached to an image.

What alternatives have you considered?

I have built a proof of concept stand alone tool but would like to make something more generally available for anyone that might need to generate notary v2 compliant signuares using some other third-party service.

Any additional context?

No response

[yizha1]

@shizhMSFT PTAL, I would like to have a discussion with you on this.

[jeremyrickard]

@yizha1 @shizhMSFT would it be alright to PR a proposed implementation of this? I have most of it implemented I believe.

[yizha1]

@yizha1 @shizhMSFT would it be alright to PR a proposed implementation of this? I have most of it implemented I believe.

Thanks @jeremyrickard, For CLI changes, the specs are required to be updated accordingly. I can work with you on the documents if needed.

• Entrance for all the commands: https://github.com/notaryproject/notation/blob/main/specs/notation-cli.md
• spec for each command under directory https://github.com/notaryproject/notation/tree/main/specs/commandline

[yizha1]

@vaninrao10 I would like to prioritize this issue after v1 release.

[yizha1]

This issue could be solved by feature #777