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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.

PUBLISHED Reserved 2026-04-09 | Published 2026-04-10 | Updated 2026-04-10 | Assigner GitHub_M




LOW: 3.7CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Problem types

CWE-129: Improper Validation of Array Index

Product status

>= 0.24.0, < 0.30.0-rc3
affected

References

github.com/...icates/security/advisories/GHSA-9qq8-cgcv-qmc9

github.com/smallstep/certificates/pull/2569

github.com/...ommit/ffd31ac0a87e03b0224cb8363094bfe602242888

github.com/smallstep/certificates/releases/tag/v0.30.0

cve.org (CVE-2026-40097)

nvd.nist.gov (CVE-2026-40097)

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