CVE-2026-40097
Step CA affected by an index out of bounds panic in TPM attestation EKU validation
- Published
- Updated
- Reserved
- Assigned by
- GitHub_M
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.
Timeline
ID reserved
By GitHub_M
- 1 day later
· 1 day later
Published
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub_MCNA (assigner) | 3.1 | Low3.7 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L |
| NVDNVD · Analyzed | 3.1 | Low3.7 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 0.19% · top 92% of all CVEs (7 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: Low 3.7.
Weakness
Affected products
- affected >= 0.24.0, < 0.30.0-rc3
Affected packages
From reviewed advisories of the GitHub Advisory Database.
- Gogithub.com/smallstep/certificatesGHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9 (opens in a new tab)
References (4)
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/security/advisories/GHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9 (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_CONFIRM
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/pull/2569 (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/commit/ffd31ac0a87e03b0224cb8363094bfe602242888 (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/releases/tag/v0.30.0 (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_MISC
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisory GHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9 (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://trackcve.app/cve/CVE-2026-40097)Record last updated .