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CVE-2026-40097 Detail

Description

Step CA is an online certificate authority for secure, automated certificate management for DevOps. From 0.24.0 to before 0.30.0-rc3, an attacker can trigger an index out-of-bounds panic in Step CA by sending a crafted attestation key (AK) certificate with an empty Extended Key Usage (EKU) extension during TPM device attestation. When processing a device-attest-01 ACME challenge using TPM attestation, Step CA validates that the AK certificate contains the tcg-kp-AIKCertificate Extended Key Usage OID. During this validation, the EKU extension value is decoded from its ASN.1 representation and the first element is checked. A crafted certificate could include an EKU extension that decodes to an empty sequence, causing the code to panic when accessing the first element of the empty slice. This vulnerability is only reachable when a device-attest-01 ACME challenge with TPM attestation is configured. Deployments not using TPM device attestation are not affected. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.30.0-rc3.


Metrics

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CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/commit/ffd31ac0a87e03b0224cb8363094bfe602242888 GitHub, Inc.
https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/pull/2569 GitHub, Inc.
https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/releases/tag/v0.30.0 GitHub, Inc.
https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/security/advisories/GHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9 GitHub, Inc.

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-129 Improper Validation of Array Index GitHub, Inc.  

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2026-40097
NVD Published Date:
04/10/2026
NVD Last Modified:
04/10/2026
Source:
GitHub, Inc.