SHshykes·Aug 12, 2015
You are right, they are not mutually exclusive, and we are working on both in parallel. We are working on specifying a standardized way to 1) hash a container in its runnable form, and 2) attach arbitrary signatures constructed from that hash. That will allow using your favorite existing tools (eg. gpg) to create arbitrary trust and verification systems. This is part of the OCP project, and will be implemented by RunC which we donated last month. See https://github.com/opencontainers/runc and https://github.com/opencontainers/specs .
As a rule of thumb, end-to-end trust and naming is most useful to developers ("How do I know I'm building on the right dependency, and using the latest and most secure version?"), and low-level hashing is most useful to ops ("How do I enforce a whitelist of containers allowed on my production cluster based on
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home-made PKI and policies?")
Another distinction is that you can use Notary (and Docker Trusted Content) with any kind of content - for example Compose files, source artifacts, system packages used to build the container, etc.