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Google Researcher Finds Vulnerability in VMware Virtualization Products

VMware this week informed customers that it has patched a high-severity information disclosure vulnerability affecting its Workstation, Fusion and vSphere virtualization products.

VMware this week informed customers that it has patched a high-severity information disclosure vulnerability affecting its Workstation, Fusion and vSphere virtualization products.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2020-3960, was reported to VMware by Cfir Cohen, a researcher from Google’s cloud security team.

According to VMware, Cohen discovered that ESXi, Workstation and Fusion are affected by an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that can allow an attacker with non-admin access to a virtual machine to read privileged information from memory.

The flaw impacts the VNMe functionality. VNMe is a storage access and transport protocol designed for flash and SSDs. Using a NVMe controller with VMware products helps reduce guest I/O processing overhead and improves performance.

The issue impacts ESXi 6.5 and 6.7, Workstation 15.x and Fusion 11.x. Patches have been released, but no workarounds appear to be available.

VMware also informed customers this week of a high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Horizon Client for Windows.

The flaw, caused by “folder permission configuration and unsafe loading of libraries” can allow a local attacker to run commands as any user. Several researchers have been credited for reporting this security hole to VMware.

In late May, the virtualization giant fixed a privilege escalation vulnerability in Fusion for macOS that was introduced by a patch for a previous flaw.

One of the researchers who reported the flaws to VMware, Rich Mirch of Critical Start, this week disclosed the details of the most recent issue and provided a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit.

Related: Details Released for Flaw Allowing Full Control Over VMware Deployments

Related: Hackers Can Compromise VMware vCenter Server Via Newly Patched Flaw

Related: Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Patched in VMware Cloud Director

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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