CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-4411 — Ibm Spectrum Scale security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.1

The Spectrum Scale 4.2.0.0 through 4.2.3.21 and 5.0.0.0 through 5.0.4.3 file system component is affected by a denial of service vulnerability in its kernel module that could allow an attacker to cause a denial of service condition on the affected system. To exploit this vulnerability, a local attacker could invoke a subset of ioctls on the Spectrum Scale device with non-valid arguments. This could allow the attacker to crash the kernel. IBM X-Force ID: 179986.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.1 (3.1)
Published
2020-05-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • ibm / spectrum_scale

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 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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