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CVE-2026-40097
Published:April 10, 2026
Updated:April 23, 2026
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.
Affected Packages
https://github.com/smallstep/certificates.git (GITHUB):
Affected version(s) >=v0.0.1-rc.1 <v0.30.0
Fix Suggestion:
Update to version v0.30.0
github.com/smallstep/certificates (GO):
Affected version(s) >=v0.24.0 <v0.30.0
Fix Suggestion:
Update to version v0.30.0
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CVSS v4
Base Score:
6.3
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
HIGH
Attack Requirements
NONE
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Vulnerable System Confidentiality
NONE
Vulnerable System Integrity
NONE
Vulnerable System Availability
LOW
Subsequent System Confidentiality
NONE
Subsequent System Integrity
NONE
Subsequent System Availability
NONE
CVSS v3
Base Score:
3.7
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
HIGH
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
LOW
Weakness Type (CWE)
Improper Validation of Array Index
EPSS
Base Score:
0.03