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Fencer Vulns
low 3.7

CVE-2026-40097 json

Step CA affected by an index out of bounds panic in TPM attestation EKU validation

published 2026-04-10 6 mo ago modified 2026-10-26 13 d ago also GHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9 , GO-2026-5297 , EUVD-2026-21506

cvss
3.7
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 8%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/smallstep/certificates 0.30.0
  • smallstep step-ca 0.30.0
  • govulncheck-vulndb openSUSE Leap 16.0 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-40097 updated cvss 3.7

github.com/smallstep/certificates: Step CA: Denial of Service via crafted attestation key certificate

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
6 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.19% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 8% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 3.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
GitHub 3.1 3.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/smallstep/certificates
>=0.24.0, <0.30.0
0.30.0

Affected products

  • smallstep certificates

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-129 Improper Validation of Array Index

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.