Updates released by VMware this week for its Horizon View Client and vSphere Data Protection (VDP) products address a total of three critical and important vulnerabilities.
One of the advisories published by the company informs users that VDP versions 5.5.x, 5.8.x, 6.0.x and 6.1.x are affected by two critical Java deserialization and credentials management flaws.
The deserialization issue, tracked as CVE-2017-4914, was reported to VMware by Tim Roberts, Arthur Chilipweli and Kelly Correll of NTT Security. According to the vendor, the flaw can be exploited remotely to execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable appliances.
The second vulnerability affecting VDP is CVE-2017-4917 and it was reported to VMware by Marc Ströbel (aka phroxvs) from HvS-Consulting. Ströbel discovered that the locally stored vCenter Server credentials are poorly encrypted, allowing an attacker to obtain the information in plaintext.
Users of the affected product have been advised to update their installations to versions 6.0.5 or 6.1.4. It’s also worth noting that VMware recently announced its intention to discontinue the VDP product.
A second advisory published by VMware this week describes an important command injection vulnerability affecting the VMware Horizon View Client for Mac.
Florian Bogner of Kapsch BusinessCom AG discovered that the application has a command injection flaw in the service status script. An unprivileged user can exploit the vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the vulnerable Mac OS X system, VMware said.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-4918, affects View Client versions 2.x, 3.x and 4.x and it has been patched with the release of version 4.5.
According to VMware, workarounds or mitigations are not available for any of the vulnerabilities fixed this week. US-CERT has also published an alert advising users to review the advisories and apply necessary updates.
While some vulnerabilities in VMware products are less likely to be exploited, there are cases where the risk of exploitation is higher. For example, VMware determined recently that several of its products were affected by an Apache Struts 2 flaw that had been exploited in the wild. The company also released patches recently for Workstation vulnerabilities exploited at the 2017 Pwn2Own hacking competition.
Related: VMware Patches Critical RCE Flaw in vCenter Server
Related: VMware Patches Vulnerabilities in AirWatch Android Apps
Related: VMware Patches Workstation Vulnerabilities
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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