syft is a CLI tool and Go library for generating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) from container images and filesystems. A password disclosure flaw was found in Syft versions v0.69.0 and v0.69.1. This flaw leaks the password stored in the SYFT_ATTEST_PASSWORD environment variable.

The SYFT_ATTEST_PASSWORD environment variable is for the syft attest command to generate attested SBOMs for the given container image. This environment variable is used to decrypt the private key (provided with syft attest --key <path-to-key-file>) during the signing process while generating an SBOM attestation. This vulnerability affects users running syft that have the SYFT_ATTEST_PASSWORD environment variable set with credentials (regardless of if the attest command is being used or not).

Users that do not have the environment variable SYFT_ATTEST_PASSWORD set are not affected by this issue. The credentials are leaked in two ways: in the syft logs when -vv or -vvv are used in the syft command (which is any log level >= DEBUG) and in the attestation or SBOM only when the syft-json format is used. Note that as of v0.69.0 any generated attestations by the syft attest command are uploaded to the OCI registry (if you have write access to that registry) in the same way cosign attach is done.

This means that any attestations generated for the affected versions of syft when the SYFT_ATTEST_PASSWORD environment variable was set would leak credentials in the attestation payload uploaded to the OCI registry. This issue has been patched in commit 9995950c70 and has been released as v0.70.0. There are no workarounds for this vulnerability.

Users are advised to upgrade.