Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities Patched in VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion

VMware informed customers last week that it patched several vulnerabilities that can lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition or information disclosure in its ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion products.

Eduard Kovacs

July 2, 2018

VMware described the flaws as out-of-bounds read issues in the shader translator component. An attacker with regular user privileges can exploit the security holes to obtain information or crash virtual machines.

The vulnerabilities, classified as “important,” are tracked as CVE-2018-6965, CVE-2018-6966 and CVE-2018-6967. A Tencent ZhanluLab researcher who uses the online moniker “RanchoIce” has been credited for reporting the flaws to VMware. A researcher from Cisco Talos independently discovered CVE-2018-6965.

According to VMware, the flaws impact ESXi 6.7 and Workstation 14.x running on any platform, and Fusion 10.x running on OS X. Patches and updates have been released for each of the affected products.

Cisco Talos has published an advisory containing technical details for CVE-2018-6965. The company has assigned a CVSS score of 6.5 to this vulnerability, which puts it near the “high severity” range.

“A specially crafted pixel shader can cause a read access violation resulting in, at least, denial of service. An attacker can provide a specially crafted shader file (either in binary or text form) to trigger this vulnerability. This vulnerability can be triggered from VMware guest and VMware host, which will be affected (leading to vmware-vmx.exe process crash on host),” Talos wrote in its advisory.

“In short, it is possible to create a shader in such a way that it will cause invalid pointer calculation. The pointer is later used for read memory operations. This causes access violation due to the pointer being invalid, which results in a denial of service, but could potentially be turned into an information disclosure vulnerability,” Talos added.

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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