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 a NULL pointer dereference.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "5.3",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-19T20:17:03.553Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-19T20:17:03.553Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability involves a NULL pointer dereference flaw that can be leveraged by a remote attacker to induce a denial of service condition.\nThe affected products include IBM AIX 7.2, IBM AIX 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1.\nThe primary impact of successful exploitation is service disruption, causing the targeted system or component to crash or become unresponsive, thereby denying access to legitimate users and critical operational resources.\nThe risk implications are significant for enterprise environments relying on these operating systems and virtualization engines for continuous availability.\nAn attacker must have remote network access to target vulnerable services, though specific authentication and privilege requirements are dictated by the underlying network protocol and service implementation exposed to the attack vector.\nNo specific exploitation requirements beyond network reachability and triggering the vulnerable code path are detailed in the input.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of the vulnerability stems from an insecure memory management operation where a pointer is assigned a NULL value and subsequently dereferenced without adequate validation or error-handling checks.\nThe vulnerable component resides within the networking or service architecture of IBM AIX 7.2, IBM AIX 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1.\nExploitation occurs when a remote attacker transmits a specially crafted input, packet, or request over the network to the target system.\nUpon receipt, the affected daemon, kernel module, or service processes the malicious input and attempts to access memory referenced by the uninitialized or explicitly zeroed pointer.\nBecause the pointer points to address 0x0 instead of a valid memory allocation, the operating system or application encounters an unhandled memory access violation.\nThis hardware- or software-level exception forces an immediate abnormal termination of the process or a kernel panic, resulting in a denial of service.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: 1) The attacker identifies a vulnerable network-exposed service running on IBM AIX 7.2, AIX 7.3, or PowerVM VIOS 4.1. 2) The attacker crafts a payload designed to trigger the specific code path lacking bounds or pointer validation. 3) The attacker transmits the payload over the network. 4) The target system processes the request, encounters the NULL pointer dereference, and crashes, fulfilling the denial of service objective.\nNetwork exposure is required for remote exploitation, while post-exploitation impact is strictly limited to availability loss, as remote code execution is generally not feasible via a standard NULL pointer dereference vulnerability."
}