Home/CVE/Step CA is an online certificate authority for secure, automated certificate management for DevOps. From 0.24.0 to befor
CVE

CVE-2026-40097

Step CA is an online certificate authority for secure, automated certificate management for DevOps. From 0.24.0 to befor

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.

LOW · CVSS 3.7 EPSS 0.00052
Monitor
  • No active-exploitation, high-EPSS, or public-exploit signals - routine patching cadence
Sigma rules0 YARA rules0

Weakness Classification

Affected Products & Versions

2
smallstep step-ca>= 0.24.0 and < 0.30.0
smallstep step-caall versions

Affected Packages

1
Language-ecosystem packages (from OSV) tied to this CVE, with the version that fixes it - the dependency-level detail NVD doesn’t carry.
Go github.com/smallstep/certificates LOW fixed in 0.30.0

Scoring & Timeline

3.7
LOW · CVSS v3.1 · security-advisories@github.com
View on NVD
Attack Vector
Network Adjacent Local Physical
Attack Complexity
Low High
Privileges Required
None Low High
User Interaction
None Required
Scope
Unchanged Changed
Confidentiality
None Low High
Integrity
None Low High
Availability
None Low High
Published to NVD10 Apr 2026 · 05:17 PM
CVSS VectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
SSVC triage · cisa-vulnrichment
Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
SSVC asks the questions that actually drive patch urgency: is it being exploited, can attacks be automated, and how total is the impact.
🔗

References & Sources

4
Source URLs (vendor pages, mailing lists, write-ups). Exploit/PoC links are in their own section above to avoid duplication.
Intelligence Graph · click any node to traverse
CVETechnique ActorTool Family
drag to reposition · click any node to traverse · button top-right enlarges
External lookups - second-class, for what we don’t hold ourselves
Vulnerabilities
CISA KEV catalog
CWE weaknesses
CAPEC attack patterns
Package vulnerabilities
Threat intelligence
Threat actors
Tools & malware
ATT&CK techniques
IOCs
Detection & defense
Sigma rules
YARA rules
Atomic Red Team tests
D3FEND countermeasures
Compliance
NIST 800-53
ISO 27001:2022
SOC 2 TSC
PCI-DSS v4.0
CIS Controls v8.1
About
All capabilities
Live statistics
Data sources
Privacy policy
Terms of service
threatengine.sh  ·  Open-source threat intelligence platform  ·  100+ authoritative sources  ·  Every fact traces to its origin