CVE-2026-79968 in Secure Connect Gateway
Summary
by MITRE • 09/09/2026
Dell SCG 5.0 Appliance versions prior to 5.36.00.16 and Dell SCG 5.0 Application versions prior to 5.36.00.00, contains a Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition vulnerability. An unauthenticated attacker with remote access could potentially exploit this vulnerability, leading to denial of service.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/09/2026
The identified vulnerability represents a classic race condition flaw within the Dell Storage Containerized Gateway appliance and application software, specifically affecting versions prior to 5.36.00.16 for the appliance and 5.36.00.00 for the application component. This issue is categorized as a Time-of-check Time-of-use vulnerability, which falls under the Common Weakness Enumeration identifier CWE-367. In this specific context, the flaw arises from an insecure handling of shared resources where the system checks a condition or state and then uses that information to make a decision without ensuring that the underlying resource has not changed between the check and the use phases. This temporal gap allows for exploitation by malicious actors who can manipulate the timing of operations to bypass security controls or trigger unintended behavior within the application logic.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is primarily centered on service availability rather than data confidentiality or integrity in its immediate manifestation. An unauthenticated attacker with remote network access can exploit this race condition to cause a denial of service against the Dell SCG infrastructure. By carefully crafting requests that target the vulnerable code path, an adversary can force the application into an unstable state, leading to crashes, hangs, or resource exhaustion. This effectively disrupts storage services managed by the appliance, preventing authorized users from accessing critical data and potentially causing significant operational downtime for organizations relying on this storage solution for their business continuity needs.
From a threat intelligence perspective, this vulnerability aligns with ATT&CK technique T1498 Network Denial of Service, which involves directly overwhelming or impairing covered resources by consuming them to the point that they become unavailable to legitimate users. The ability to exploit this flaw remotely without authentication makes it particularly dangerous in environments where network segmentation is not strictly enforced between untrusted zones and storage management interfaces. Attackers can leverage automated tools to send high volumes of requests designed to trigger the race condition, increasing the likelihood of successful exploitation due to the probabilistic nature of timing attacks.
Mitigation strategies for this vulnerability focus on immediate patching and defensive configuration adjustments. The primary remediation is to upgrade both the Dell SCG 5.0 Appliance software to version 5.36.00.16 or later and the associated application components to version 5.36.00.00 or later, as these updates contain code fixes that enforce atomic operations or proper locking mechanisms to eliminate the race window. In scenarios where immediate patching is not feasible due to maintenance windows or compatibility concerns, organizations should implement strict network access controls to restrict remote connectivity to the SCG management interfaces exclusively to trusted IP addresses and administrative subnets. Additionally, deploying intrusion prevention systems with signatures capable of detecting abnormal request patterns associated with timing attacks can provide a layer of defense in depth against exploitation attempts while permanent fixes are applied.