VMware addressed flaws in its Workstation and Tools

VMware has informed its users that it has patched two high-severity vulnerabilities that affect its Tools and Workstation software.

VMware has patched two high-severity flaws that affect its Tools and Workstation software.

The first security flaw, tracked as CVE-2019-5522, affects VMware Tools 10.x on Windows. The vulnerability is an out-of-bounds read issue in the vm3dmp driver in Windows guest machines, it was reported by the researchers ChenNan and RanchoIce of Tencent ZhanluLab

“VMware Tools update addresses an out of bounds read vulnerability in vm3dmp driver which is installed with vmtools in Windows guest machines.  VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 7.1.” reads the advisory published by VMware.

“A local attacker with non-administrative access to a Windows guest with VMware Tools installed may be able to leak kernel information or create a denial of service attack on the same Windows guest machine,”

The company addressed the vulnerability with the release of the version 10.3.10, unfortunately, no workarounds are available.

The second issue, tracked as CVE-2019-5525, is a use-after-free bug affecting the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) backend in Workstation 15.x. The vulnerability could be exploited by an attacker with normal user privileges on the guest machine to execute arbitrary code on the underlying Linux host. Chaining the issue with another vulnerability it is possible to execute arbitrary code.

“VMware Workstation contains a use-after-free vulnerability in the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) backend. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 8.5.” states the advisory.

“A malicious user with normal user privileges on the guest machine may exploit this issue in conjunction with other issues to execute code on the Linux host where Workstation is installed.”

The company addressed this vulnerability with the release of the Workstation 15.1.0 for Linux. The vulnerability, rated as “high severity,” was reported by Brice L’helgouarc’h from Amossys.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking)

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