Cortex completes OSTIF security audit

Cortex has completed a security audit organized by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund, with results published through the CNCF Blog. OSTIF credited Quarkslab for the audit work on the project.

Cortex is long-term, multi-tenant, scalable open source storage for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. It sits behind metric and telemetry pipelines that need retention, tenancy isolation, and horizontal scale beyond what a single Prometheus instance can provide.

For engineers running multi-tenant observability stacks, an external security review of that storage layer is concrete risk reduction. Shared metric backends hold high-cardinality time series, tenant labels, and operational history; findings from a formal audit are the practical input for hardening configs, access controls, and upgrade priorities—not marketing claims.

In the CNCF observability landscape, Cortex competes with other Prometheus-compatible remote storage and multi-tenant backends. Publishing an OSTIF-backed audit via the CNCF Blog signals that the project is treating security review as part of ecosystem trust, which matters when operators choose among open source storage options for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry data.

Operators and maintainers should read the published audit results, map any reported issues to their Cortex deployment and tenancy model, and track follow-up fixes in the project. The next signal is whether remediation lands in releases and whether related Prometheus and OpenTelemetry storage projects pursue the same OSTIF path.