CVE-2026-103059
An attacker who can construct a case variant of another user's registered RSA public key for which they can derive the private key could have that key matched to the victim's account and authenticate over SSH as that user.
Does this matter?
High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.39%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.
Description
When Gitea's built-in SSH server is enabled (`START_SSH_SERVER = true`), the presented public key was looked up with an SQL `LIKE` comparison of its encoded content, which is case-insensitive on some databases, including the default SQLite. An attacker who can construct a case variant of another user's registered RSA public key for which they can derive the private key could have that key matched to the victim's account and authenticate over SSH as that user. Keys are now looked up by fingerprint.
- CVSS 3.1
- 9.1 CRITICALCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
- EPSS
- 0.39% probability · 33th percentile
- Public exploits
- None in Exploit-DB
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-305
- Affected
- gitea/gitea
- Source
- 88ee5874-cf24-4952-aea0-31affedb7ff2
EPSS moved from 0.2% on 7 October 2026 to 0.4% on 26 October 2026.
References
- https://blog.gitea.com/release-of-28.0.0/Release Notes
- https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/39423Patch, Issue Tracking
- https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/releases/tag/v28.0.0Release Notes
- https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/security/advisories/GHSA-8pwg-hcgm-54cpVendor Advisory
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.