grafana/docs/sources/administration/plugin-management/plugin-sign.md

title	description	labels	keywords	weight
Plugin signatures	Sign your plugins to make sure they haven't been tampered with.	products enterprise oss cloud	grafana plugins plugin navigation customize configuration grafana.ini sandbox frontend	200

Plugin signatures

Plugin signature verification, also known as signing, is a security measure to make sure plugins haven't been tampered with. Upon loading, Grafana checks to see if a plugin is signed or unsigned when inspecting and verifying its digital signature.

Learn more at plugin policies.

How does verifiction work?

At startup, Grafana verifies the signatures of every plugin in the plugin directory.

To see the result of this verification for each plugin, navigate to Configuration -> Plugins. A signature can have any of the following signature status:

Signature status	Description
Core	Core plugin built into Grafana.
Invalid signature	The plugin has an invalid signature.
Modified signature	The plugin has changed since it was signed. This may indicate malicious intent.
Unsigned	The plugin is not signed.
Signed	The plugin signature was successfully verified.

What happens if a plugin is not signed?

If a plugin is unsigned, then Grafana neither loads nor starts it. Grafana also writes an error message to the server log:

WARN[05-26|12:00:00] Some plugin scanning errors were found   errors="plugin '<plugin id>' is unsigned, plugin '<plugin id>' has an invalid signature"

Plugin signature levels

All plugins are signed under a signature level. The signature level determines how the plugin can be distributed.

Plugin Level	Description
Private	Private plugins are for use on your own Grafana. They may not be distributed to the Grafana community, and are not published in the Grafana catalog.
Community	Community plugins have dependent technologies that are open source and not for profit. Community plugins are published in the official Grafana catalog, and are available to the Grafana community.
Commercial	Commercial plugins have dependent technologies that are closed source or commercially backed. Commercial plugins are published on the official Grafana catalog, and are available to the Grafana community.

Allow unsigned plugins

{{< admonition type="note" >}} Unsigned plugins are not supported in Grafana Cloud. {{< /admonition >}}

We strongly recommend that you don't run unsigned plugins in your Grafana instance. However, if you're aware of the risks and you still want to load an unsigned plugin, refer to Configuration.

If you've allowed loading of an unsigned plugin, then Grafana writes a warning message to the server log:

WARN[06-01|16:45:59] Running an unsigned plugin   pluginID=<plugin id>

{{< admonition type="note" >}} If you're developing a plugin, then you can enable development mode to allow all unsigned plugins. {{< /admonition >}}

Sign a plugin you've developed

If you are a plugin developer and want to know how to sign your plugin, refer to Sign a plugin.