fulcio vulnerability

Fulcio is a free-to-use certificate authority for issuing code signing certificates for an OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity. Prior to 1.8.3, function identity.extractIssuerURL splits (via a call to strings.Split) its argument (which is untrusted data) on periods. As a result, in the face of a malicious request with an (invalid) OIDC identity token in the payload containing many period characters, a call to extractIssuerURL incurs allocations to the tune of O(n) bytes (where n stands for the length of the function's argument), with a constant factor of about 16. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.8.3.

Published 4 Dec 2025Updated 18 Oct 20262 sources
CVSS 7.5

What happened

Fulcio is a free-to-use certificate authority for issuing code signing certificates for an OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity. Prior to 1.8.3, function identity.extractIssuerURL splits (via a call to strings.Split) its argument (which is untrusted data) on periods. As a result, in the face of a malicious request with an (invalid) OIDC identity token in the payload containing many period characters, a call to extractIssuerURL incurs allocations to the tune of O(n) bytes (where n stands for the length of the function's argument), with a constant factor of about 16. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.8.3.

Affected versions

fulcio: < 1.8.3 Fixed: See vendor advisory.

Why it matters

Review the vendor advisory and exposure of the affected product to determine operational impact.

Detection & mitigation

  • Apply vendor-provided updates or mitigations.
  • Review affected product exposure and access logs.

Public PoC references

No public PoC reference has passed the current publication threshold.