CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-4956 — Ibm Spectrum Protect Operations Center security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.8

IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center 7.1 and 8.1 is vulnerable to a denial of service, caused by a RPC that allows certain cache values to be set and dumped to a file. By setting a grossly large cache value and dumping that cached value to a file multiple times, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause the consumption of all memory resources. IBM X-Force ID: 192156.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.8 (3.1)
Published
2021-02-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • ibm / spectrum_protect_operations_center

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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