CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-3768 — Lenova Flex System X240 M5 Firmware security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

An unprivileged attacker with connectivity to the IMM2 could cause a denial of service attack on the IMM2 (Versions earlier than 4.4 for Lenovo System x and earlier than 6.4 for IBM System x). Flooding the IMM2 with a high volume of authentication failures via the Common Information Model (CIM) used by LXCA and OneCLI and other tools can exhaust available system memory which can cause the IMM2 to reboot itself until the requests cease.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2018-01-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • lenova / flex_system_x240_m5_firmware
  • lenova / flex_system_x280_x6_firmware
  • lenova / flex_system_x440_m4_firmware
  • lenova / flex_system_x480_x6_firmware
  • lenova / flex_system_x880_firmware
  • lenova / nextscale_nx360_m5_firmware

Showing 6 representative product identities from 42 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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