CVE-2015-7419 in WebSphere Portal
Summary
by MITRE
IBM WebSphere Portal 8.0.0.1 before CF19 and 8.5.0 before CF09 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via crafted requests.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 06/27/2022
IBM WebSphere Portal represents a critical enterprise portal platform that serves as a central hub for business applications and content management. The vulnerability identified as CVE-2015-7419 specifically targets memory consumption patterns within this portal infrastructure, creating a remote denial of service condition that can severely impact business operations. This vulnerability affects both the 8.0.0.1 release line with cumulative fix CF19 and the 8.5.0 release line with cumulative fix CF09, indicating a widespread issue across multiple versions of the platform. The flaw manifests when remote attackers submit specially crafted requests that exploit memory handling mechanisms within the portal's processing pipeline. These requests are designed to trigger excessive memory allocation or retention patterns that gradually consume available system resources, ultimately leading to service unavailability.
The technical nature of this vulnerability aligns with CWE-400, which categorizes issues related to unspecified resource exhaustion. The flaw operates by manipulating the portal's request processing logic to cause abnormal memory consumption patterns that can persist and accumulate over time. Attackers can leverage this vulnerability through network-based exploitation without requiring authentication or privileged access to the system. The memory consumption occurs during the processing of specific request parameters or content structures that are not properly validated or limited in their resource requirements. This type of vulnerability falls under the ATT&CK technique T1499.004, which describes network denial of service attacks that target system resources to make services unavailable. The portal's memory management system fails to adequately detect or limit the resource consumption patterns triggered by these crafted requests, allowing the attack to proceed unchecked.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple service disruption to potentially affect business continuity and customer experience within enterprise environments. Organizations relying on WebSphere Portal for critical business applications face significant risk of service degradation or complete unavailability during attack periods. The memory consumption effect can manifest gradually, making it difficult to detect and respond to initially, as the system may appear operational while slowly consuming resources. This vulnerability particularly affects environments where the portal handles high volumes of concurrent requests or where memory resources are already constrained. The impact becomes more severe in clustered environments where memory exhaustion on one node can cascade to affect the entire system's availability and performance.
Organizations should implement immediate mitigations including applying the relevant cumulative fixes (CF19 for 8.0.0.1 and CF09 for 8.5.0) to address the root cause of the vulnerability. Network-level protections such as rate limiting and request filtering can help reduce the impact of crafted requests reaching the portal servers. System administrators should monitor memory consumption patterns and implement automated alerts when resource usage exceeds normal thresholds. Security teams should consider implementing intrusion detection systems that can identify and block suspicious request patterns associated with this vulnerability. Additionally, organizations should review their portal configurations to ensure appropriate resource limits are enforced and consider implementing additional monitoring for memory usage metrics that could indicate exploitation attempts. The vulnerability demonstrates the importance of proper input validation and resource management in enterprise portal systems, highlighting the need for comprehensive security testing and monitoring of critical business infrastructure components.