CVE-2026-14992 in DataPower Gateway
Summary
by MITRE • 10/08/2026
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, and 11.0.0.0 through 11.0.0.2 vulnerable to buffer overflow.
Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.
Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/09/2026
The vulnerability identified in IBM DataPower Gateway versions ranging from 10.5.0.0 through 10.5.0.22, 10.6.1 through 10.6.6, and specific releases within the 10.6.0.x and 11.0.0.x series represents a critical buffer overflow condition inherent to the application's input handling mechanisms. This flaw arises when the software fails to properly validate or bound-check user-supplied data before copying it into fixed-size memory buffers. In enterprise environments, IBM DataPower Gateway serves as a central hub for API management, web services security, and protocol mediation, making such an architectural weakness particularly severe due to its exposure to external network traffic. The buffer overflow allows attackers to write more data than the allocated buffer can hold, potentially overwriting adjacent memory locations that store critical control information such as return addresses or function pointers.
From a technical perspective, this vulnerability aligns with CWE-120, which classifies buffer copy without checking size limits for improper restriction of operations within boundaries. The exploitation vector typically involves sending specially crafted HTTP requests or SOAP messages to the gateway's management interface or service endpoints. When the application processes these malformed inputs, it allocates a fixed amount of memory and proceeds to fill it with data from the request payload without verifying that the input length matches the buffer capacity. This lack of rigorous boundary checking is a common deficiency in legacy codebases or complex middleware applications where performance optimizations may have inadvertently bypassed necessary security checks during high-throughput operations.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple denial of service, although crashing the gateway process remains a likely outcome if an attacker triggers memory corruption that leads to segmentation faults. More critically, successful exploitation can lead to arbitrary code execution on the underlying operating system hosting the DataPower appliance. An adversary could leverage this condition to inject and execute malicious shellcode, thereby gaining unauthorized access to sensitive internal networks protected by the gateway. This compromises the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all services proxied through the device, including financial transactions, healthcare records, or proprietary enterprise data flowing across API endpoints.
In terms of threat modeling, this vulnerability maps directly to MITRE ATT&CK technique T1190, which describes exploiting application vulnerabilities for initial access. Attackers utilizing automated scanning tools can rapidly identify vulnerable instances by probing common entry points with fuzzed payloads designed to trigger the overflow condition. Once exploited, the attacker may proceed with lateral movement within the internal network, using the compromised gateway as a pivot point to attack other systems that trust connections originating from the DataPower appliance's IP address range. The severity is further amplified by the fact that these gateways often sit at the perimeter of corporate networks, acting as the first line of defense against external threats.
Mitigation strategies must prioritize immediate patching and version upgrades provided by IBM to eliminate the underlying code defects responsible for the buffer overflow. Organizations should ensure they are running a patched release outside the affected version ranges specified in the vendor advisory. In environments where immediate patching is not feasible due to operational constraints, network-level controls such as Web Application Firewalls (WAF) can be configured to inspect incoming traffic and block requests containing payloads that exhibit characteristics of buffer overflow attempts, such as unusually long headers or malformed XML structures. Additionally, implementing strict input validation rules at the application layer for any custom integrations interacting with DataPower services is essential to prevent similar flaws in downstream applications.
Security teams should also review access control policies to ensure that management interfaces are not exposed directly to untrusted networks and restrict administrative access to authorized IP addresses only. Regular vulnerability scanning and penetration testing focused on middleware components will help identify other potential weaknesses before they can be exploited. Maintaining an up-to-date inventory of all DataPower instances across the infrastructure is crucial for ensuring comprehensive coverage during security updates, as partial patching leaves significant attack surfaces exposed to sophisticated adversaries capable of chaining multiple vulnerabilities for deeper system compromise.