Comparison
Artefact signingvsBuild provenance
Artefact signing
the cluster refuses to run an image that is not signed by your pipeline, so a pushed-by-hand image simply will not start.
Cryptographically signing published artefacts and verifying the signature before running them. Signing alone changes nothing — the value is entirely in the verification step at admission, which is the part teams skip. It binds to the digest rather than the tag, which is why an estate that deploys by mutable tag cannot meaningfully enforce it.
Full entry →Build provenance
you can prove which commit, which builder and which inputs produced this exact image, from a signed statement rather than a wiki page.
A signed record generated by the build system describing what was built, from what source, by which builder, with what inputs. It answers the question a security incident actually asks — where did this artefact come from — without relying on anyone's memory. Its trustworthiness comes from being produced by the build platform rather than by the build script, since a script an attacker controls can claim anything.
Full entry →