CVE-2026-39944 affects Ceph's RADOS Gateway (RGW) in versions prior to 20.2.4 and 19.2.6. The vulnerability stems from STS session tokens being protected only with AES-128-CBC encryption without any message authentication, making them susceptible to CBC bit-flip attacks. An attacker holding any valid STS token — even one with no elevated privileges — can tamper with the token's acct_type, perm_type, and is_admin fields undetected. Forging the is_admin field triggers a global administrative override that bypasses all capability checks, granting full RGW administrative access. The attack is remotely exploitable over the RGW S3 endpoint, requires no encryption oracle or network observation, and only needs STS to be enabled. This is a critical privilege escalation vulnerability in a widely used open-source distributed storage platform. The issue has been patched in Ceph versions 20.2.4 and 19.2.6.