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": "7.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-20T22:17:14.713Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-20T22:17:14.713Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability is classified as a NULL pointer dereference flaw affecting multiple versions of IBM AIX and IBM PowerVM VIOS. The primary impact of successful exploitation is a denial of service (DoS), potentially leading to system instability, kernel panics, or unexpected reboots of the target operating system instance. The affected products include IBM AIX 7.2, AIX 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1. The risk implication involves the potential disruption of mission-critical workloads hosted on enterprise Power Systems infrastructure. An attacker capable of interacting with the vulnerable system components can trigger the condition without necessarily requiring complex authentication or elevated privileges, depending on the specific attack vector exposed by the implementation. Exploitation requirements generally entail sending specially crafted inputs or triggering specific operations that force the kernel or system component to handle uninitialized or null memory references incorrectly, resulting in an immediate crash or exception state.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of the vulnerability stems from insufficient pointer validation within the affected kernel components or system daemons of IBM AIX 7.2, AIX 7.3, and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1. Specifically, the software fails to verify whether a critical pointer references a valid memory address before attempting to dereference it during specific operational workflows. When an invalid, uninitialized, or previously freed pointer is accessed as a valid memory location, the operating system or system service encounters an unhandled memory exception.\nThe attack flow typically begins with a remote attacker interacting with network services, kernel interfaces, or management daemons exposed by the target system. By submitting a specially crafted payload or initiating a sequence of requests designed to invoke the flawed code path, the attacker forces the application or kernel subsystem to process an operation where the expected memory reference evaluates to NULL. Upon attempting to read or write to this null address space, the execution flow faults.\nBecause this error occurs within privileged kernel contexts or critical system daemons lacking proper exception handling for null memory access, the operating system cannot gracefully recover. This triggers an immediate kernel panic, system crash, or abrupt termination of the core service, effectively denying service to legitimate users and dependent virtual machines. Network exposure, authentication requirements, and privilege prerequisites are determined by the specific vulnerable subsystem handling the input, but the architectural flaw lies fundamentally in memory management and pointer validation practices within the affected IBM operating system releases."
}