VMware Updates Products to Patch Critical, Important Flaws

VMware has released updates for several of its products to patch a couple of vulnerabilities rated critical and important.

The critical vulnerability is related to how the RMI server of Oracle JRE JMX deserializes authentication credentials. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can leverage the weakness to cause deserialization flaws and execute arbitrary commands.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-3427, affects vCenter Server 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0 on both Windows and Linux; vSphere Replication 5.6.x, 5.8.x, 6.0.x and 6.1.x on Linux; vCloud Director 5.5.x, 5.6.x and 8.0.x on Linux; and all non-appliance versions of vRealize Operations Manager 6.x.

Patches and workarounds have been made available for all products, except for vSphere Replication 6.1.x. The vendor noted that vSphere Replication is only affected if the vCloud Tunneling Agent, which is not enabled by default, is running.

The vulnerability rated “important,” identified as CVE-2016-2077, is a host privilege escalation issue affecting VMware Workstation 11.x.x and Player 7.x.x for Windows.

The flaw, reported to VMware by Andrew Smith of Sword & Shield Enterprise Security, allows a local attacker to elevate their privileges due to the fact that the vulnerable products don’t properly reference one of their executables.

Last month, VMware updated vCenter Server, vCloud Director and vRealize Automation Identity Appliance to address a critical vulnerability related to the Client Integration Plugin (CIP), a component that provides access to a virtual machine’s console in the vSphere Web Client.

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