Description

IBM AIX 7.2, and 7.3 and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1 could allow a local attacker to gain elevated privileges due to improper privilege management.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-20T22:17:08.147Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-20T22:17:08.147Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A local privilege escalation vulnerability has been identified in IBM AIX 7.2, 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1. The flaw stems from improper privilege management within the affected operating system environments, allowing a malicious local actor to elevate their access rights and compromise system integrity.\nThe vulnerability exposes organizations to severe security risks, as an attacker with standard local user access can potentially execute arbitrary commands or access restricted system resources with elevated privileges. This compromises the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the underlying host or partition.\nExploitation of this vulnerability requires local access to the target system. An attacker must first authenticate with low-level privileges before initiating the attack sequence to abuse the improper privilege management controls present in the affected software.\nGiven the nature of local privilege escalation vectors in enterprise Unix environments, remediation requires applying official vendor patches or updates provided by IBM to correct the underlying access control logic.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of the vulnerability resides in improper privilege management within IBM AIX 7.2, 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1. The affected components fail to properly enforce security boundaries, validate user contexts, or restrict sensitive operations, allowing unauthorized privilege transitions during local execution.\nAttackers targeting this vulnerability must possess local access to the vulnerable system with pre-existing low-level authentication. The attack flow begins with the execution of specially crafted commands or interaction with vulnerable binaries, scripts, or system interfaces that improperly handle user privileges.\nBecause the system fails to adequately verify the execution context or validate privilege boundaries, the local user can trigger unintended code execution paths or manipulate privileged data structures. This bypasses standard access control lists (ACLs) and security mechanisms native to the operating system.\nThe post-exploitation impact includes the attainment of elevated privileges, such as root-level or administrative access. With these elevated rights, an attacker can modify system configurations, access highly sensitive data, install persistent backdoors, or pivot to other network segments and virtualized partitions managed by IBM PowerVM VIOS.\nThe vulnerability affects IBM AIX versions 7.2 and 7.3, as well as IBM PowerVM VIOS version 4.1. No network exposure is required for initial exploitation, as the vector is strictly local, necessitating prior access or a compromised low-privileged account on the target system."
}