9.3 - VMSA-2009-0005

a. Denial of service guest to host vulnerability in a virtual device

A vulnerability in a guest virtual device driver, could allow a guest operating system to crash the host and consequently any virtual machines on that host.

VMware would like to thank Andrew Honig of the Department of Defense for reporting this issue.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2008-4916 to this issue.

b. Windows-based host denial of service vulnerability in hcmon.sys

A vulnerability in an ioctl in hcmon.sys could be used to create a denial of service on a Windows-based host. This issue can only be exploited by a privileged Windows account.

VMware would like to thank Nikita Tarakanov for reporting this issue to us.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-1146 to this issue.

Note: newly released hosted products (see table in this section) address another potential denial of service in hcmon.sys as well. Also this issue can only be exploited by a privileged Windows account.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2008-3761 to this issue.

c. A VMCI privilege escalation on Windows-based hosts or Windows- based guests.

The Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) is an infrastructure that provides fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host.

A vulnerability in vmci.sys could allow privilege escalation on Windows-based machines. This could occur on Windows-based hosts or inside Windows-based guest operating systems.

Current versions of ESX do not support the VMCI interface and hence they are not affected by this vulnerability.

Note: Installing the new hosted releases will not remediate the issue on Windows-based guests. The VMware Tools packages will need to be updated on each Windows-based guest followed by a reboot of the guest system.

VMware would like to thank Nikita Tarakanov for reporting this issue to us.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-1147 to this issue.

Refer to VMware KB article 1009826 on the steps that are needed to remediate this vulnerability on Windows-based hosts. This KB article is found at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1009826.

d. VNnc Codec Heap Overflow vulnerabilities

The VNnc Codec assists in Record and Replay sessions. Record and Replay record the dynamic virtual machine state over a period of time.

Two heap overflow vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on VMware hosted products. For an attack to be successful the user must be tricked into visiting a malicious web page or opening a malicious video file.

VMware would like to thank Aaron Portnoy from TippingPoint DVLabs for reporting these issues to us. TippingPoint has issued the following identifiers: ZDI-CAN-435, ZDI-CAN-436.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has has assigned the names CVE-2009-0909 and CVE-2009-0910 to these issues.

e. ACE shared folders vulnerability

The VMware Host Guest File System (HGFS) shared folders feature allows users to transfer data between a guest operating system and the non-virtualized host operating system that contains it.

A vulnerability in ACE shared folders could allow a previously disabled and not removed shared folder in the guest to be enabled by a non ACE Administrator.

VMware would like to thank Emmanouel Kellinis, KPMG London, penetration testing team for reporting this issue to us.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has has assigned the name CVE-2009-0908 to this issue.

f. A remote denial of service vulnerability in authd for Windows based hosts.

A vulnerability in vmware-authd.exe could cause a denial of service condition on Windows hosts.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-0177 to this issue.