Cosign malicious attachments can cause system-wide denial of service

Exploitation

No confirmed exploitation recorded. Patch Next marks exploitation only from CISA KEV.

CVSS

4.2 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS

• CVE-2024-29902: 0.66% estimated exploitation activity in the next 30 days; percentile 51.55 (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-03). This is a model estimate, not proof of exploitation or customer exposure.

As published by the source; long descriptions are shortened.

Summary A remote image with a malicious attachment can cause denial of service of the host machine running Cosign. This can impact other services on the machine that rely on having memory available such as a Redis database which can result in data loss. It can also impact the availability of other services on the machine that will not be available for the duration of the machine denial. Details The root cause of this issue is that Cosign reads the attachment from a remote image entirely into memory without checking the size of the attachment first. As such, a large attachment can make Cosign read a large attachment into memory; If the attachments size is larger than the machine has memory available, the machine will be denied of service. The Go runtime will make a SIGKILL after a few seconds of system-wide denial. The root cause is that Cosign reads the contents of the attachments entirely into memory on line 238 below:…

Published by the source

11 Apr 2024, 17:05 UTC

Last modified by the source

11 Apr 2024, 17:05 UTC

Source last checked

26 Oct 2026, 15:03 UTC

1. Revision 1 · created · 26 Oct 2026

   Published from ghsa record GHSA-88jx-383q-w4qc

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# Patch Next advisory brief: CVE-2024-29902

Advisory: Cosign malicious attachments can cause system-wide denial of service
IDs: CVE-2024-29902, GHSA-88jx-383q-w4qc
Record: https://patchnext.com/advisories/cve-2024-29902 (revision 1, source checked 26 Oct 2026, 15:03 UTC)
Inventory: none attached. This brief comes from a public page and does not say whether any deployment is affected.
Severity: Medium (CVSS 4.2)
Exploitation: no confirmed exploitation recorded. Patch Next confirms exploitation only from CISA KEV.
Vendor response: Partial vendor fix; fixed versions by package: github.com/sigstore/cosign/v2 2.2.4. A vendor fix does not mean a deployment is fixed.

## Affected components
- Go github.com/sigstore/cosign: affected <= 2.2.3
- Go github.com/sigstore/cosign/v2: affected <= 2.2.3; fixed in 2.2.4

## Suggested inspection (read-only)
- Go github.com/sigstore/cosign: check the installed version with your package manager.
- Go github.com/sigstore/cosign/v2: check the installed version with your package manager.

## Supported action
No complete vendor fix is recorded. Follow the primary source's mitigation guidance and check this record again before closing anything.

## Required regression checks
- Run the test suite and a production build.
- Exercise the features that depend on github.com/sigstore/cosign, github.com/sigstore/cosign/v2.
- Repeat the inspection and confirm that only fixed versions remain installed.

## Rollback considerations
- Keep the previous lockfile and deployment artifact. Rolling back reinstates the vulnerable version, so apply any documented mitigation while you fix forward.

## Unresolved questions
- Which deployments run an affected version?
- Exploitation status can change. Check again before lowering the priority.
- Mark the work resolved only after the fixed version is verified in production.

## Sources
- Verified: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-88jx-383q-w4qc (GitHub-reviewed advisory GHSA-88jx-383q-w4qc lists affected ranges: Go github.com/sigstore/cosign >=0 =0 <=2.2.3)

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