CVE-2026-9002 IBM WebSphere eXtremes Scale is affected by uncontrolled resource consumption when XDF is enabled

Medium 6.5 Published 30 Jun 2026 Updated 30 Jun 2026

An adjacent attacker can cause a denial of service in IBM WebSphere Extreme Scale by triggering resource exhaustion via deeply nested Protocol Buffers messages when XDF is enabled.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Local or same network only
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: None listed

What is CVE-2026-9002?

CVE-2026-9002 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in IBM WebSphere Extreme Scale, published on 30 Jun 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

IBM WebSphere Extreme Scale 8.6.1.0 through 8.6.1.6 could allow an adjacent attacker to cause a denial of service due to improper validation in the XDF decoder. The application processes deeply nested Protocol Buffers messages and attacker-controlled length prefixes without sufficient bounds checking, which may allow an attacker on the same network to trigger a StackOverflowError or OutOfMemoryError, resulting in a crash of the WebSphere Application Server JVM.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-9002?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Ibm Websphere Extreme Scale.

How do I fix CVE-2026-9002?

No fix has been published for CVE-2026-9002 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2026-9002 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-9002 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

Also known as GHSA-qh26-gm6x-4qpg.