VMware ESXi (6.7 before ESXi670-202004101-SG and 6.5 before ESXi650-202005401-SG), VMware Workstation (15.x before 15.1.0) and VMware Fusion (11.x before 11.1.0) contain a memory leak vulnerability in the VMCI module. A malicious actor with local non-administrative access to a virtual machine may be able to crash the virtual machines vmx process leading to a partial denial of service.
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 |
| Fusion |
Vmware |
11.0.0 (including) |
11.1.0 (excluding) |
| Workstation |
Vmware |
15.0.0 (including) |
15.1.0 (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