Why Did Docker Abandon TUF?: A Turbulent History of Container Signing

Introduction While doing a deep dive on Sigstore and TUF, a question hit me out of nowhere. "OK, but how exactly are container images protected from tampering?" If you understand TUF, you'd guess: "You write the container image hash into targets.json , sign it with an offline key, done." And in 2015, that's exactly how it worked. But today, that mental model is completely outdated . The container signing architecture in the Docker world has gone through a turbulent decade: "They tried to do it t