CVE-2026-11885 in PowerVM
Summary
by MITRE • 07/30/2026
IBM PowerVM Hypervisor FW1110.00 through FW1110.20, FW1060.00 through FW1060.71, and FW950.00 through FW950.H1 A carefully crafted OS hypervisor call can cause the PowerVM hypervisor to crash or compromise OS memory integrity.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 07/31/2026
This vulnerability affects IBM PowerVM hypervisor versions ranging from FW1110.00 through FW1110.20, FW1060.00 through FW1060.71, and FW950.00 through FW950.H1, representing a critical security flaw that could lead to system instability or unauthorized memory access. The vulnerability stems from improper handling of hypervisor calls made by operating systems, specifically when these calls are crafted in a particular manner that exploits weaknesses in the hypervisor's input validation mechanisms. This issue falls under CWE-122, which describes buffer overflow conditions, and represents a direct threat to the isolation properties that hypervisors must maintain between virtual machines and the underlying physical hardware.
The technical flaw manifests when a malicious operating system within a virtual machine executes a specially crafted hypervisor call that causes the PowerVM hypervisor to either crash or corrupt memory integrity. This vulnerability enables an attacker who has compromised an operating system within a virtual environment to potentially escape the confines of their virtual machine and access memory from other virtual machines or even the host system itself. The attack vector leverages the trust relationship between the hypervisor and guest operating systems, where legitimate hypervisor calls are processed without sufficient validation to prevent malicious manipulation.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe as it undermines fundamental security assumptions in virtualized environments. A successful exploitation could result in complete compromise of virtual machine isolation, allowing attackers to access sensitive data from other virtual machines running on the same physical host. This threat extends beyond simple system crashes to include potential data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and lateral movement within the virtual infrastructure. The vulnerability particularly affects cloud computing environments where multiple tenants share the same physical hardware, as it could enable one tenant to access another's confidential information.
Mitigation strategies should focus on immediate firmware updates to the affected PowerVM hypervisor versions, which would patch the validation flaws in hypervisor call processing. Organizations should also implement network segmentation and monitoring to detect unusual hypervisor activity patterns that might indicate exploitation attempts. Additionally, maintaining strict access controls and regularly auditing virtual machine configurations helps reduce the attack surface. The vulnerability aligns with ATT&CK technique T1059.003 for executing malicious code through hypervisor interfaces and T1070.004 for bypassing security measures through hypervisor manipulation. System administrators should also consider implementing hypervisor integrity monitoring solutions that can detect unauthorized modifications to hypervisor memory structures, as recommended in the NIST SP 800-144 guidelines for virtualization security controls.