Runbook: Supply Chain Verification (Advanced)

Purpose

Operate artifact trust controls during deploy and incident response without bypassing safety.

Scope

This runbook covers:

  • signature and attestation verification checks
  • Kyverno verify policy behavior (Audit/Enforce)
  • incident triage for untrusted artifact events

Pre-Deploy Checklist

  1. Artifact is immutable (digest or immutable env tag).
  2. SBOM/provenance evidence exists.
  3. Signature verification succeeds.
  4. Policy mode for target namespace is known (Audit or Enforce).

Verification Commands

cosign verify "$IMAGE_REF"
cosign verify-attestation --type spdx "$IMAGE_REF"
kubectl get cpol | rg "verify|attestation"
kubectl get policyreport -A

Namespace-level incident evidence:

kubectl -n <ns> get events --sort-by=.lastTimestamp | tail -n 30
kubectl -n <ns> describe pod <pod-name>

Incident Workflow

  1. Freeze promotion of questionable artifact.
  2. Validate signature and attestation against policy constraints.
  3. If validation fails, rollback to last known trusted digest.
  4. Record policy/event evidence in incident timeline.
  5. Fix CI signing/provenance path before next promotion.

Audit to Enforce Strategy

  1. Start in Audit for develop.
  2. Review violations for at least one full release cycle.
  3. Tighten identity constraints (issuer/subject) as needed.
  4. Move selected rules to Enforce in develop.
  5. Promote policy mode gradually to higher environments.

Failure Modes

  1. Missing signature:
  • expected: audit/deny depending on mode
  • action: fix signing in CI, do not bypass in production
  1. Untrusted signer identity:
  • expected: audit/deny
  • action: align OIDC workflow identity and policy constraints
  1. Missing/invalid attestation:
  • expected: audit/deny when attestation rule is active
  • action: restore SBOM/provenance generation in pipeline

Break-Glass Rule

Break-glass exception must be:

  • time-bound
  • scoped to specific workload/environment
  • linked to incident or approval record
  • removed immediately after remediation