CVE-2026-40097

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

Published Apr 10, 2026 CVSS 3.1 · 3.7 Low EPSS < 1% KEV · Not listed
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.

Remediation

No solution or workaround provided in the CVE record

Tracking

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Advisories

Source ID Title
Github GHSA Github GHSA GHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9 Step CA affected by an index out of bounds panic in TPM attestation EKU validation
History
Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared Smallstep step-ca
CPEs cpe:2.3:a:smallstep:step-ca:*:*:*:*:*:go:*:*
cpe:2.3:a:smallstep:step-ca:0.30.0:rc1:*:*:*:go:*:*
cpe:2.3:a:smallstep:step-ca:0.30.0:rc2:*:*:*:go:*:*
Vendors & Products Smallstep step-ca
Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared Smallstep
Smallstep certificates
Vendors & Products Smallstep
Smallstep certificates
Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'no', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}

Type Values Removed Values Added
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.
Title Step CA affected by an index out of bounds panic in TPM attestation EKU validation
Weaknesses CWE-129
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 3.7, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L'}

Weaknesses

Sources

Status
PUBLISHED
Assigner
GitHub_M
Published
Updated
Apr 10, 2026, 6:30 PM
Reserved
Apr 9, 2026, 1:41 AM
Status
Analyzed
Published
Apr 10, 2026, 5:17 PM
Modified
Oct 26, 2026, 10:10 PM