CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-5540

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Nov 20, 2019 | Modified: Aug 24, 2020
CVSS 3.x
7.7
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
4 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

VMware Workstation (15.x before 15.5.1) and Fusion (11.x before 11.5.1) contain an information disclosure vulnerability in vmnetdhcp. Successful exploitation of this issue may allow an attacker on a guest VM to disclose sensitive information by leaking memory from the host process.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Workstation Vmware 15.0.0 (including) 15.5.1 (excluding)

Potential Mitigations

  • Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
  • For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
  • When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
  • To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References