CVE-2026-40097
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.
Does this matter?
Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.18%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.
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.
- CVSS 3.1
- 3.7 LOWCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
- EPSS
- 0.18% probability · 8th percentile
- Public exploits
- None in Exploit-DB
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-129
- Affected
- smallstep/step-ca
- Source
- security-advisories@github.com
EPSS 0.2% since 26 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.
References
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/commit/ffd31ac0a87e03b0224cb8363094bfe602242888Patch
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/pull/2569Issue Tracking, Patch
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/releases/tag/v0.30.0Product, Release Notes
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/security/advisories/GHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9Mitigation, Vendor Advisory
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.