Vulnerability in Linuxfoundation Sigstore Timestamp Authority

CVE-2026-39984

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.

Vulnerability class: Improper Certificate Validation

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.001 (1.1th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 1st percentile — 1.1% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-39984: held from 0.001 to 0.001.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.001 · newest: 0.001 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-39984?
CVE-2026-39984 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linuxfoundation Sigstore Timestamp Authority, classified under Improper Certificate Validation. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2026-04-15.
How severe is CVE-2026-39984?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.