Description

IBM AIX 7.2, and 7.3 and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1 could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service due to uncontrolled resource consumption.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-19T15:16:57.843Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-19T15:16:57.843Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A denial of service vulnerability exists within IBM AIX 7.2 and 7.3, as well as IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1, which exposes systems to uncontrolled resource consumption.\nThe vulnerability allows a remote attacker to exhaust critical system resources, leading to service degradation or complete system unavailability.\nThe primary impact of successful exploitation is a denial of service affecting the availability of the targeted operating system or virtual I/O server.\nRisk implications include potential operational disruptions in enterprise environments relying on the affected IBM platforms for core virtualization and processing tasks.\nThe attacker capabilities involve remote execution vectors to induce resource depletion without requiring elevated local access.\nExploitation requirements are dictated by the network exposure of the vulnerable service, allowing remote threat actors to trigger the uncontrolled resource consumption flaw.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability stems from improper management of system resources within IBM AIX 7.2, AIX 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1, resulting in an uncontrolled resource consumption condition.\nThe root cause is the lack of proper bounding, rate-limiting, or throttling mechanisms for specific incoming requests or data streams processed by the vulnerable component.\nExploitation occurs when an unauthenticated remote attacker transmits specially crafted network traffic or excessive requests to the targeted service.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: First, the attacker identifies the network-exposed endpoint handling the vulnerable processing logic. Second, the attacker floods the service or transmits payloads that force the underlying allocation of memory, CPU, or other critical system resources without proper release.\nDue to the absence of adequate resource exhaustion safeguards, the affected component continues to consume system resources indefinitely or at an unsustainable rate upon processing the malicious payload.\nThis behavior leads to resource starvation across the operating system or the virtual I/O server instance, ultimately causing processes to hang, crash, or become entirely unresponsive.\nThe vulnerable components reside within the networking or core operating system subsystems of IBM AIX and IBM PowerVM VIOS.\nNetwork exposure is required for remote exploitation, and the attack can be executed over the network without prior authentication or special privileges.\nThe post-exploitation impact is strictly limited to availability loss, manifesting as a denial of service condition that necessitates administrative intervention, such as a system reboot or service restart, to restore normal operations."
}