4.5 Enable Content trust for Docker

Information

Content trust is disabled by default. You should enable it.

Rationale:

Content trust provides the ability to use digital signatures for data sent to and received from remote Docker registries. These signatures allow client-side verification of the integrity and publisher of specific image tags. This ensures provenance of container images.

Solution

To enable content trust in a bash shell, enter the following command:

export DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST=1

Alternatively, set this environment variable in your profile file so that content trust in enabled on every login.

Impact:

In an environment where DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST is set, you are required to follow trust procedures while working with images - build, create, pull, push and run. You can use the --disable-content-trust flag to run individual operations on tagged images without content trust on an as-needed basis but that defeats the purpose of enabling content trust and hence, should be avoided wherever possible.

Note: Content trust is currently only available for users of the public Docker Hub. It is currently not available for the Docker Trusted Registry or for private registries.

Default Value:

By default, content trust is disabled.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/1476

Item Details

Category: SYSTEM AND INFORMATION INTEGRITY

References: 800-53|SI-7(6)

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 84cc9273370bda162006137dea6a21e87870f0a9be4ffd32af5753621856cbc1