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 use-after-free.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.4",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-19T20:17:06.807Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-19T20:17:06.807Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A use-after-free vulnerability exists in IBM AIX 7.2, 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1, which can be exploited by a remote attacker to induce a denial of service condition on affected systems.\nThe vulnerability stems from improper memory management within the targeted software components, allowing an unauthorized remote attacker to manipulate heap memory allocations after they have been freed.\nSuccessful exploitation of this flaw leads directly to system instability, application crashes, or complete operating system crashes, culminating in an unavailibility of critical services.\nThe risk implications are severe for enterprise environments relying on continuous availability of IBM AIX and PowerVM VIOS platforms, as the disruption impacts core virtualization and operating system operations.\nAttack capabilities include the remote triggering of the memory corruption condition without requiring prior authentication or privileged access, depending on the specific network exposure of the vulnerable interface.\nRemediation requires applying the official vendor-supplied software updates or patches provided by IBM to resolve the underlying memory management defect.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability is fundamentally rooted in a use-after-free (UAF) condition within the memory management architecture of IBM AIX 7.2, 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1.\nA use-after-free defect occurs when a program continues to use a pointer after the memory region it references has been deallocated or freed.\nIn this specific context, the vulnerable component fails to properly nullify or manage object references after deallocation, leaving dangling pointers active within the heap memory space.\nWhen a remote attacker interacts with the affected network service or protocol handler, they can induce specific execution paths that reference these dangling pointers.\nThe step-by-step attack flow begins with the attacker establishing network connectivity to the vulnerable service exposed by the target system.\nThe attacker then transmits specially crafted network packets or input sequences designed to allocate, deallocate, and subsequently manipulate the targeted memory objects.\nUpon processing the malformed input, the application attempts to read from or write to the memory address referenced by the dangling pointer.\nThis invalid memory access triggers a fatal exception, kernel panic, or application fault, resulting in a denial of service condition that halts system operations or terminates critical services.\nThe affected versions encompass IBM AIX 7.2, IBM AIX 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1.\nExploitation does not inherently require local system access, valid user credentials, or elevated privileges, increasing the overall risk profile for network-exposed instances.\nThe post-exploitation impact is strictly confined to availability degradation, specifically manifesting as service interruptions, forced reboots, or persistent denial of service states requiring administrative intervention to restore normal operations."
}