CVE-2010-0775 in WebSphere Application Server
Summary
by MITRE
Unspecified vulnerability in IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 6.0 before 6.0.2.41, 6.1 before 6.1.0.31, and 7.0 before 7.0.0.11 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption and daemon crash) via a crafted request, related to the nodeagent and Deployment Manager components.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 02/01/2025
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2010-0775 represents a critical denial of service weakness within IBM WebSphere Application Server versions prior to specific patch levels. This flaw affects multiple major versions including WAS 6.0 before 6.0.2.41, 6.1 before 6.1.0.31, and 7.0 before 7.0.0.11, indicating a widespread impact across the IBM WebSphere product line. The vulnerability specifically targets the nodeagent and Deployment Manager components, which are fundamental elements responsible for managing application server nodes and coordinating deployment operations across distributed environments. These components play a crucial role in maintaining the operational integrity of enterprise application infrastructures, making their compromise particularly dangerous for organizations relying on IBM WebSphere for mission-critical applications.
The technical nature of this vulnerability involves a crafted request that can trigger excessive memory consumption and ultimately cause daemon crashes within the affected IBM WebSphere components. This type of attack exploits weaknesses in the request processing logic of the nodeagent and Deployment Manager services, where malformed or specially constructed requests can cause the system to allocate excessive memory resources or trigger internal process failures. The memory consumption aspect suggests that the vulnerability may involve improper input validation or resource management within the server's processing pipeline, while the daemon crash component indicates potential buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, or other runtime errors that can bring down critical system services. The unspecified nature of the vulnerability description typically indicates that the underlying flaw involves complex interactions between multiple system components or requires specific conditions to be exploited successfully.
From an operational impact perspective, this vulnerability poses significant risks to enterprise environments that depend on IBM WebSphere Application Server for their application delivery infrastructure. The ability to cause denial of service through remote attacks means that unauthorized parties can potentially disrupt business operations by consuming system resources or crashing critical daemon processes. This vulnerability particularly affects organizations with distributed application architectures where nodeagent and Deployment Manager components are actively managing multiple server nodes. The impact extends beyond simple service disruption to potentially compromise the entire application deployment ecosystem, affecting application availability, data processing capabilities, and overall system stability. Organizations may experience extended downtime during recovery periods, potential data loss from abrupt service termination, and increased operational overhead in managing system recovery and security remediation efforts.
The vulnerability aligns with CWE-400, which categorizes weaknesses related to resource exhaustion, and may also involve elements of CWE-121, concerning stack-based buffer overflows, or CWE-122, heap-based buffer overflows, depending on the specific implementation details. From an adversarial perspective, this vulnerability maps to ATT&CK technique T1499.004, which covers network denial of service attacks, and potentially T1059, involving command and control communications through application layer protocols. Organizations should implement immediate patch management strategies to address this vulnerability, as IBM released specific fix levels for each affected version to resolve the memory consumption and daemon crash issues. Additionally, network segmentation and access controls should be implemented to limit exposure of these critical components to untrusted networks, while monitoring systems should be deployed to detect anomalous resource consumption patterns that may indicate exploitation attempts. The remediation process should include comprehensive testing of patched environments to ensure that the vulnerability is fully addressed without introducing compatibility issues with existing applications or deployment configurations.