Description

IBM DataPower Gateway 10.5.0.0 through 10.5.0.22, 10.6.1 through 10.6.6, 10.6.0.0 through 10.6.0.10, 11.0.0.0 through 11.0.0.2 could allow an attacker to cause a heap buffer underwrite and potentially crash the service.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-10-08T13:17:16.200Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-10-08T13:17:16.200Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A heap buffer underwrite vulnerability has been identified in IBM DataPower Gateway, affecting firmware versions 10.5.0.0 through 10.5.0.22, 10.6.0.0 through 10.6.0.10, 10.6.1 through 10.6.6, and 11.0.0.0 through 11.0.0.2.\nThis vulnerability originates from improper memory management within the service, which can be triggered by a remote attacker to induce a heap buffer underwrite condition.\nThe primary security impact of this flaw is a potential service crash, resulting in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. Because the vulnerability involves memory corruption, it may theoretically facilitate further exploitation if control flow can be redirected.\nThe flaw affects the core gateway processing logic, necessitating prompt attention from administrators. Exploitation does not necessarily require complex environmental conditions, but relies on the attacker's ability to supply malformed input that interacts with the vulnerable memory allocation routines.\nOrganizations deploying the affected IBM DataPower versions are advised to evaluate their exposure and prioritize security updates to maintain service availability and system integrity.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability is characterized as a heap buffer underwrite, a memory corruption defect occurring when a program performs an operation that writes data before the start of an allocated memory block on the heap.\nIn the context of IBM DataPower Gateway, this flaw manifests during the processing of specific data structures or protocols where bounds checking for pointers is insufficient or incorrectly implemented. When the affected component handles crafted input, an arithmetic operation on a memory pointer may result in the pointer shifting to an address preceding the intended heap buffer.\nThe exploitation flow typically begins with the attacker delivering a specially crafted request or payload to the DataPower service. This input is processed by the vulnerable component, which fails to correctly validate the size or offset of the data relative to the heap allocation. As the component proceeds to write data, it performs an out-of-bounds write operation into memory addresses immediately preceding the allocated buffer.\nA heap buffer underwrite is significantly dangerous because it allows an attacker to overwrite metadata associated with heap management, such as heap chunk headers, forward/backward pointers, or adjacent object data. By corrupting these control structures, the attacker can influence the behavior of the memory allocator (e.g., glibc malloc or custom heap implementations).\nWhile the primary documented impact is a service crash (Denial of Service), the memory corruption primitives provided by an underwrite can often be weaponized by sophisticated attackers to gain arbitrary code execution. By carefully crafting the input to overwrite function pointers or object vtables residing at lower memory addresses, the attacker may redirect the execution flow of the DataPower process to attacker-controlled memory regions.\nThe vulnerability affects multiple major release streams (10.5.x, 10.6.x, and 11.0.x), indicating a potential regression or a pervasive pattern in the underlying code handling memory operations across these versions. Because the gateway often operates at the edge of the network, the vulnerable components may be exposed to untrusted external traffic, increasing the ease with which an attacker can reach the vulnerable code path.\nSuccessful exploitation requires the service to remain running after the initial corruption, though in many heap-based underwrite scenarios, the immediate result is a segmentation fault or a memory integrity violation, confirming the DoS vector."
}