Update 01/10/18: VMSA-2018-0004 has been released detailing Hypervisor-Assisted Guest Mitigation fixes. An explanation of the different types of mitigations being provided by VMware can be found in KB52245. Please note that if you have applied the patches listed in VMSA-2018-0004 you do not need the patches listed in VMSA-2018-0002.

Update 01/04/18: OS vendors have begun issuing patches that address CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715, and CVE-2017-5754 for their operating systems. For these patches to be fully functional in a guest OS additional ESXi and vCenter Server updates will be required. These updates are being given the highest priority. Please sign up to the Security-Announce mailing list to be alerted when these updates are available.

Today VMware has released the following new security advisory:

VMSA-2018-0002 – VMware ESXi, Workstation and Fusion updates address side-channel analysis due to speculative execution.

This advisory documents remediation for known variants of the Bounds-Check Bypass (CVE-2017-5753) and Branch Target Injection (CVE-2017-5715) issues due to speculative execution disclosed today by Google Project Zero. These issues may result in information disclosure from one Virtual Machine to another Virtual Machine that is running on the same host.

A third issue due to speculative execution, Rogue Data Cache Load (CVE-2017-5754), was disclosed along the other two issues. It does not affect ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion because ESXi does not run untrusted user mode code, and Workstation and Fusion rely on the protection that the underlying operating system provides.

The remediation as documented in VMSA-2018-0002, has been present in VMware Cloud on AWS since early December 2017.

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Customers should review the security advisory and direct any questions to VMware Support.