Description

IBM DataPower Gateway 11.0.0.0 through 11.0.0.2 could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service due to uncontrolled resource consumption.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-10-08T13:17:15.520Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-10-08T13:17:15.520Z",
  "executiveSummary": "IBM DataPower Gateway versions 11.0.0.0 through 11.0.0.2 are susceptible to a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability caused by uncontrolled resource consumption. A remote attacker can exploit this weakness to exhaust critical system resources, causing the gateway services to degrade or terminate entirely. Because IBM DataPower Gateway serves as an integration and security gatekeeper for enterprise APIs and web services, a disruption in its availability directly impacts the availability of downstream enterprise applications.\nThe vulnerability allows an attacker to degrade the operational capability of the gateway remotely, bypassing normal service limits without requiring localized or privileged access. Mitigation requires administrative intervention to update the affected systems or implement network-level traffic filtering to limit exposure to malicious requests targeting the underlying gateway infrastructure.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability exists within IBM DataPower Gateway versions 11.0.0.0 through 11.0.0.2. The fundamental root cause of this security flaw lies in the gateway's internal resource management architecture, which fails to properly enforce allocation limits during the processing of inbound transactions. IBM DataPower Gateway operates as a high-performance security and integration proxy designed to process heavy workloads, including XML parsing, JSON serialization, and cryptographic handshakes. When handling complex or malformed inbound network requests, the platform's processing engine fails to implement adequate resource throttling, allowing individual transactions to consume disproportionate amounts of system memory, thread pools, or CPU cycles.\nTo exploit this vulnerability, a remote attacker targets an exposed network service endpoint hosted on the vulnerable IBM DataPower Gateway instance. The attack flow begins with the transmission of specifically designed network payloads or a sustained stream of requests designed to trigger intensive backend processing. Because the exploitation process does not require valid authentication credentials or administrative privileges, any remote actor with network-level access to the gateway can initiate this vector. As these requests enter the processing pipeline, the gateway allocates system resources to process them, but due to the lack of input constraints, the resources are not freed or are allocated at an exponential rate, rapidly depleting the system's global pool.\nThe post-exploitation impact of this uncontrolled resource consumption is a severe denial of service (DoS) condition. As critical system resources—such as file descriptors, socket buffers, and heap memory—are entirely exhausted, the DataPower firmware becomes incapable of handling legitimate incoming API transactions or administration traffic. Legitimate client requests are either met with gateway timeout errors or dropped entirely, severely impacting downstream application availability. The appliance may eventually experience a kernel panic, memory allocation failure, or trigger watchdog restarts, forcing the gateway into an extended period of downtime during the reboot cycle."
}