When verifying artifact signatures using a certificate, Cosign first verifies the certificate chain using the leaf certificate's "not before" timestamp and later checks expiry of the leaf certificate using either a signed timestamp provided by the Rekor transparency log or from a timestamp authority, or using the current time. The root and all issuing certificates are assumed to be valid during the leaf certificate's validity. An issuing certificate with a validity that expires before the leaf certificate will be considered valid during verification even if the provided timestamp would mean the issuing certificate should be considered expired.
No impact to users of the public Sigstore infrastructure. This may affect private deployments with customized PKIs. In practice, this is unlikely to occur as CAs should not be issuing certificates that outlive the validity of the CA and its parents.
Upgrade to the latest release, or verify the certificate chain out of band.
{
"nvd_published_at": "2026-02-19T23:16:24Z",
"github_reviewed_at": "2026-02-19T22:09:12Z",
"severity": "LOW",
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-295"
],
"github_reviewed": true
}