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Fencer Intel
critical 10.0

CVE-2025-44005 json

Step CA Has Authorization Bypass in ACME and SCEP Provisioners

published 11mo ago modified last mo. also GHSA-h8cp-697h-8c8p , GO-2025-4180 , EUVD-2025-201012

cvss
10.0
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
9.1%
EPSS 9.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 95%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An attacker can bypass authorization checks and force a Step CA ACME or SCEP provisioner to create certificates without completing certain protocol authorization checks.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/smallstep/certificates 0.29.0
  • govulncheck-vulndb SLE Module for Package Hub 15 SP6, openSUSE Leap 15.6 0.0.20251209T172047-150000.1.127.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2025:4395-1

  • govulncheck-vulndb openSUSE Leap 16.0 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1

  • step-certificates Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 0.29.0-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2025-44005

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Is CVE-2025-44005 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2025-44005 updated cvss 10.0

github.com/smallstep/certificates: github.com/smallstep/certificates: Authorization bypass allows unauthorized certificate creation

  • 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
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
10mo ago

Exploit prediction

9.09% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 95% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 10.0 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N
GitHub 3.1 10.0 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/smallstep/certificates
<0.29.0
0.29.0

Affected products

  • smallstep Step-CA

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-287 Improper Authentication
  • CWE-306 Missing Authentication for Critical Functionality

References

Sources

Fencer Intel 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.