3. Problem Description

a. VMware VMCI privilege escalation





VMware ESX, Workstation, Fusion, and View contain a vulnerability in the handling of control code in vmci.sys. A local malicious user may exploit this vulnerability to manipulate the memory allocation through the Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) code. This could result in a privilege escalation on Windows-based hosts and on Windows-based Guest Operating Systems.

The vulnerability does not allow for privilege escalation from the Guest Operating System to the host (and vice versa). This means that host memory can not be manipulated from the Guest Operating System (and vice versa).

Systems that have VMCI disabled are also affected by this issue.

VMware would like to thank Derek Soeder of Cylance, Inc. and Kostya Kortchinsky of Microsoft for independently reporting this issue to us.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the names CVE-2013-1406 to this issue.

Column 4 of the following table lists the action required to remediate the vulnerability in each release, if a solution is available.