A flaw in the RTAS firmware‑to‑OS interface of IBM PowerVM Hypervisor allows an attacker who has root privileges on a logical partition to craft a request that causes the partition’s firmware to crash. The crash makes the affected logical partition unavailable, but other partitions on the same managed system remain operational. This denial of service is confined to the compromised partition and does not affect the hypervisor or other software components directly.

The vulnerability affects a range of IBM PowerVM Hypervisor firmware revisions, specifically FW1120.00 through FW1120.01, FW1110.00 through FW1110.31, FW1060.00 through FW1060.81, and FW950.00 through FW950.H3. Products impacted span IBM Power System models across Power 9, Power 10, and Power 11 families, including the E1180, S1122, E1150, S1024, and S922, among others. IBM has supplied specific firmware revisions (e.g., FW1110.32 for Power 11, FW1120.02 for Power 10, and FW950.H4 for Power 9) that remediate the issue for each hardware level.

The CVSS score of 5.1 indicates moderate severity, and the EPSS score of less than 1% shows a low probability of exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability is not catalogued in the CISA KEV list. Since the flaw requires local root access on a logical partition, environments that enforce strict access controls for root privileges or do not grant such privileges to user processes are less susceptible. Nevertheless, once local administrative access is achieved, an attacker can easily trigger a crash, resulting in isolation of the targeted partition.