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VMware Patches Fusion, Workstation Vulnerabilities

VMware informed customers on Monday that updates for its Fusion and Workstation products patch important denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

VMware informed customers on Monday that updates for its Fusion and Workstation products patch important denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

According to VMware, Fusion 10.x on macOS is impacted by a signature bypass flaw that can be exploited for local privilege escalation. The security hole, tracked as CVE-2018-6962, was discovered by a researcher from Chinese company Ant Financial. The issue has been fixed with the release of VMware Fusion 10.1.2.

VMware also revealed that Workstation 14.x on any platform and Fusion 10.X on macOS are impacted by several DoS vulnerabilities. 
“VMware Workstation and Fusion contain multiple denial-of-service vulnerabilities that occur due to NULL pointer dereference issues in the RPC handler. Successful exploitation of these issues may allow an attacker with limited privileges on the guest machine trigger a denial-of-Service of their guest machine,” the company said in its advisory.

The flaw, identified as CVE-2018-6963, was reported to VMware by Hahna Latonick and Kevin Fujimoto through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), and independently by Bruno Botelho. The issue was addressed with the release of Workstation 14.1.2 and Fusion 10.1.2.

ZDI has yet to publish its advisories for the vulnerabilities found by Latonick and Fujimoto, but the company’s site shows that the issues were reported in mid-April.

VMware on Monday also published an advisory describing the impact of a recently uncovered speculative execution attack method on its products.

Researchers disclosed the details of two new issues, related to the Meltdown and Spectre attacks, that have been dubbed Variant 3a and Variant 4.

VMware says Variant 4, tracked as CVE-2018-3639, affects vSphere, Workstation and Fusion. Updates for these products enable Hypervisor-Assisted Guest mitigations for this vulnerability.

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“vCenter Server, ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion update speculative execution control mechanism for Virtual Machines (VMs). As a result, a patched Guest Operating System (GOS) can remediate the Speculative Store bypass issue (CVE-2018-3639) using the Speculative-Store-Bypass-Disable (SSBD) control bit. This issue may allow for information disclosure in applications and/or execution runtimes which rely on managed code security mechanisms. Based on current evaluations, we do not believe that CVE-2018-3639 could allow for VM to VM or Hypervisor to VM Information disclosure,” VMware said.

Earlier this month, the company published an advisory informing customers that VMware NSX SD-WAN Edge by VeloCloud contains an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability. While the issue is potentially serious as it allows remote code execution, it has been assigned a severity rating of “important” as the impacted component is not enabled by default and it will be removed in future releases.

Related: VMware Acquires Threat Detection and Response Firm E8 Security

Related: VMware Patches DoS Vulnerability in Workstation, Fusion

Related: VMware Addresses Meltdown, Spectre Flaws in Virtual Appliances 

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing 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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