Patchfirst
CVE-2026-103059 Critical · 9.1 EPSS 0.4%

When Gitea's built-in SSH server is enabled (`START_SSH_SERVER = true`), the presented public key was looked up with…

Gitea · Gitea

Summary

Gitea's built-in SSH server, when enabled (START_SSH_SERVER = true), matched presented public keys by an SQL LIKE comparison of their encoded content, which is case-insensitive on some databases including the default SQLite. An attacker who can present a case variant of another user's registered RSA public key, and who can derive the corresponding private key, can authenticate over SSH as that user, with no authentication or user interaction required beforehand.

Official description · NVD

When Gitea's built-in SSH server is enabled (`START_SSH_SERVER = true`), the presented public key was looked up with an SQL `LIKE` comparison of its encoded content, which is case-insensitive on some databases, including the default SQLite. An attacker who can construct a case variant of another user's registered RSA public key for which they can derive the private key could have that key matched to the victim's account and authenticate over SSH as that user. Keys are now looked up by fingerprint.

Breakdown
15.2 / 100
Exploited
Not confirmed
Reports
0
Tactics
0/15

Disclosed on 6 Oct 2026. No public exploit code or confirmed exploitation is recorded.

techniques

No techniques linked

No ATT&CK techniques are linked to this CVE yet. MITRE CTID has not mapped it, and no report passage in the corpus ties it to a technique.

What security researchers reported

Not named in any threat report yet

Also mentioned in 8 community threat pulses (AlienVault OTX)

Weaker evidence

Pulses are indicator collections that anyone can publish. A mention is not confirmation of exploitation.

References

4 links, grouped by NVD tag
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