CVE-2026-53708: ibm mcp-context-forge

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-53708 is a medium (CVSS 6.6) vulnerability in ibm mcp-context-forge. EPSS estimates a 0.35% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 27.4% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 14-09-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 14-09-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

ContextForge is an AI gateway, registry, and proxy that provides centralized discovery, guardrails, and management for MCP, A2A, and REST or gRPC APIs. Prior to 1.0.3, the /admin/gateways/test call site in mcpgateway/admin.py calls validate_gateway_test_url() in mcpgateway/common/validators.py to resolve and reject private, loopback, link-local, and cloud-metadata addresses, but ResilientHttpClient later resolves the original hostname again without binding the validated address. When MCPGATEWAY_ADMIN_API_ENABLED is enabled, an attacker with a database-backed role containing explicit gateways.read permission can use DNS rebinding to return a public address during validation and a private or metadata address during connection, bypassing ssrf_blocked_networks and ssrf_dns_fail_closed because those controls apply only to the validation-time result. The endpoint's allow_admin_bypass=False setting means a bootstrap-only virtual platform-admin identity without a database role is not sufficient. Successful exploitation can reach internal services and cloud metadata, expose cloud credentials, access internal APIs, or probe internal network ports. This issue is fixed in version 1.0.3.

• CWE-350Reliance on Reverse DNS Resolution for a Security-Critical ActionThe product performs reverse DNS resolution on an IP address to obtain the hostname and make a security decision, but it does not properly ensure that the IP address is truly associated with the hostname.
• CWE-367Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race ConditionThe product checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource's state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check.
• CWE-918Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)The web server receives a URL or similar request from an upstream component and retrieves the contents of this URL, but it does not sufficiently ensure that the request is being sent to the expected destination.