What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-44005: Step CA Has Authorization Bypass in ACME and SCEP Provisioners

• Severity: critical (CVSS 10.0 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 9.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-12-17 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-287

Description

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

Affected products

• Go Github.Com/Smallstep/Certificates: before 0.29.0 — fixed in 0.29.0
• smallstep Step-CA: 0.28.4, v0.28.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Go Github.Com/Smallstep/Certificates 0.29.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/security/advisories/GHSA-h8cp-697h-8c8p
• https://talosintelligence.com/vulnerability_reports/TALOS-2025-2242
• https://www.talosintelligence.com/vulnerability_reports/TALOS-2025-2242

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