Building Trusted Content with GitHub Actions | Docker

As part of our continued efforts to improve the security of the software supply chain and increase trust in the container images developers create and use every day, Docker has begun migrating its Docker Official Images (DOI) builds to the GitHub Actions platform. Leveraging the GitHub Actions hosted, ephemeral build platform enables the creation of secure, verifiable images with provenance and SBOM attestations signed using OpenPubkey and the GitHub Actions OIDC provider.

DOI currently supports up to nine architectures for a wide variety of images, more than any other collection of images. As we increase the trust in the DOI catalog, we will spread out the work over three phases. In our first phase, only Linux/AMD64 and Linux/386 images will be built on GitHub Actions. For the second phase, we eagerly anticipate the availability of GitHub Actions Arm-based hosted runners next year to add support for additional Arm architectures. In our final phase, we will investigate using GitHub Actions self-hosted runners for the image architectures not supported by GitHub Actions hosted runners to cover any outstanding architectures.

In addition to using GitHub Actions, the new DOI signing approach requires establishing a root of trust that identifies who should be signing Docker Official Images. We are working with various relevant communities — for example, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF, a Linux Foundation project), the CNCF TUF (The Update Framework) and in-toto projects, and the OCI technical community — to establish and distribute this trust root using TUF.

To ensure smooth and rapid developer adoption, we will integrate DOI TUF+OpenPubkey signing and verification into the container toolchain. These pluggable integrations will enable developers to seamlessly verify signatures of DOI, ensuring the integrity and origin of these fundamental artifacts. Soon, verifying your DOI base image signatures will be integrated into the Build and push Docker images GitHub Action for a more streamlined workflow.

What’s next

Looking forward, Docker will continue to develop and extend the TUF+OpenPubkey signing approach to make it more widely useful, enhancing and simplifying trust bootstrapping, signing, and verification. As a next step, we plan to work with Docker Verified Publishers (DVP) and Docker-Sponsored Open Source (DSOS) to expand signing support to additional Docker Trusted Content. Additionally, plans are in place to offer an integration of Docker Hub with GitHub Actions OIDC, allowing developers to push OCI images directly to Docker Hub using their GitHub Actions OIDC identities.

Learn more