Medium severity · published Apr 14, 2026
CVE-2026-39984
Sigstore Timestamp Authority has Improper Certificate Validation in verifier
5.5
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Sigstore Timestamp Authority is a service for issuing RFC 3161 timestamps. Versions 2.0.5 and below contain an authorization bypass vulnerability in the VerifyTimestampResponse function. VerifyTimestampResponse correctly verifies the certificate chain signature, but the TSA-specific constraint checks in VerifyLeafCert uses the first non-CA certificate from the PKCS#7 certificate bag instead of the leaf certificate from the verified chain. An attacker can exploit this by prepending a forged certificate to the certificate bag while the message is signed with an authorized key, causing the library to validate the signature against one certificate but perform authorization checks against another. This vulnerability only affects users of the timestamp-authority/v2/pkg/verification package and does not affect the timestamp-authority service itself or sigstore-go. The issue has been fixed in version 2.0.6.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 1% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
TI
timestamp-authority · sigstore
< 2.0.6 · source: vendor
ST
Sigstore Timestamp Authority · Linuxfoundation
before 2.0.6 · source: NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-39984
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-39984
Product
https://github.com/sigstore/timestamp-authority/releases/tag/v2.0.6
Mitigation
https://github.com/sigstore/timestamp-authority/security/advisories/GHSA-xm5m-wgh2-rrg3
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