CVE-2026-103059 Gitea built-in SSH server authentication bypass through key case folding

What is CVE-2026-103059?

CVE-2026-103059 is a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in Gitea Gitea, published on 6 Oct 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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.

Weakness: CWE-305

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-103059?

1 open source package ship an affected version, including gitea. It affects 1 product.

Products include Gitea Gitea.

How do I fix CVE-2026-103059?

Upgrade gitea to 28.0.0 or later.

Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.

Is CVE-2026-103059 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-103059 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Gitea Gitea

• CVE-2026-60004 Gitea Code Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2026-73278 Gitea WebAuthn bypass during OAuth and OIDC sign-in Critical 9.8
• CVE-2026-94205 Gitea fork workflow approval bypass through maintainer-triggered events Critical 9.8
• CVE-2022-42968 Gitea vulnerable to Argument Injection Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-45330 Improper Privilege Management in Gitea Critical 9.8

All Gitea Gitea vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BIT-gitea-2026-103059, GHSA-8pwg-hcgm-54cp, MINI-fffj-jxj3-r2xf, MINI-w3j4-qm32-6qv7.