Vulnerabilities

VMware Flaws Allow Security Bypass on Mac OS X

VMware has patched a couple of moderate-severity information disclosure vulnerabilities affecting some of the company’s Mac OS X products.

Eduard Kovacs

October 26, 2016

VMware has patched a couple of moderate-severity information disclosure vulnerabilities affecting some of the company’s Mac OS X products.

Marco Grassi of Tencent’s KeenLab discovered that VMware Tools versions 9.x and 10.x have a flaw when running on OS X virtual machines (VMs). The vulnerability (CVE-2016-5328) can allow a local user to obtain information that can be leveraged to bypass a security mechanism.

A similar flaw (CVE-2016-5329) affects version 8.x of VMware Fusion, a virtualization solution that allows users to run multiple guest operating systems on a Mac computer.

“Successful exploitation of this issue may allow a privileged local user on a system where System Integrity Protection (SIP) is enabled, to obtain kernel memory addresses to bypass the kASLR protection mechanism. SIP is default enabled in the latest versions of Mac OS X,” reads VMware’s description for both the vulnerabilities.

The vulnerability has been patched in VMware Tools with the release of version 10.1.0 and in VMware Fusion with the release of version 8.5. There are no known workarounds for these issues.

This is the third advisory released by VMware in 2016 for a vulnerability in Tools, which includes utilities designed to enhance the performance of the VM guest operating system and improve VM management.

In January, VMware announced patching an important privilege escalation flaw and, in August, it disclosed a DLL hijacking issue that could have been exploited for arbitrary code execution.

Related Reading: Hackers Invited to Target VMware at Pwn2Own 2016

Written By Eduard Kovacs

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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