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The CVE-2025-36140 vulnerability in IBM watsonx.data stems from a lack of resource allocation limits for its ingestion pods. In Kubernetes environments, these pods are responsible for processing and ingesting data into the platform. Without configured memory or CPU constraints, an authenticated user can trigger operations that cause a pod to consume excessive system resources.
This occurs because the pod’s container does not have defined `resources.limits` in its Kubernetes specification. When malicious or malformed data ingestion tasks are submitted, the pod attempts to allocate more memory and CPU than the host node can provide. This leads to resource exhaustion on the node, affecting the specific ingestion service and potentially destabilizing other co-located workloads.
The sustained overconsumption triggers out-of-memory (OOM) conditions or extreme CPU throttling, rendering the ingestion pod unresponsive. Consequently, all data ingestion pipelines handled by that pod fail, causing a denial of service for that functionality within the watsonx.data platform.
DailyCVE Form
Platform: IBM watsonx.data
Version: 2.2 – 2.2.1
Vulnerability: Resource Exhaustion
Severity: Medium
Date: 2025-12-10
Prediction: Patch by 2025-12-20
What Undercode Say:
Check pod resource limits
kubectl get pod <ingestion-pod-name> -o jsonpath='{.spec.containers[].resources.limits}'
Monitor pod resource consumption
kubectl top pod -l app=watsonx-data-ingestion
Example secure pod spec snippet resources: limits: memory: "512Mi" cpu: "500m" requests: memory: "256Mi" cpu: "250m"
How Exploit:
Authenticated user submits resource-intensive ingestion job.
Protection from this CVE
Apply Kubernetes resource limits.
Impact:
Ingestion service denial.
🎯Let’s Practice Exploiting & Learn Patching For Free:
Sources:
Reported By: nvd.nist.gov
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