[News]: VMware Tools HGFS Vulnerability

by Davoud Teimouri · Published 13/07/2018 · Updated 13/07/2018

VMware Tools HGFS Out-Of-Bounds Read Vulnerability

VMware Tools contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in HGFS. Successful exploitation of this issue may lead to information disclosure or may allow attackers to escalate their privileges on guest VMs.

Note: In order to be able to exploit this issue, file sharing must be enabled.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the identifier CVE-2018-6969 to this issue.

VMware Tools must be updated to 10.3.0 for each Windows VM to resolve CVE-2018-6969. The new version is available at the below link:

VMware Tools 10.3.0

It’s recommended that upgrade VMware Tools if you have enabled sharing but I think, it’s better upgrade VMware Tools anyway.

Other resolved issues in this release are as follows:

Repair option is removed from the Control Panel of VMware Tools installer.Repair option is replaced with Change option in the Control Panel of VMware Tools installer.This issue is resolved in this release.
Process ID of a discontinued VMware Tools service might get reused immediately by the system.On Linux and UNIX like operating systems, the process id (PID) of a stopped VMware Tools service might get reused immediately by the system. As a result, the new process might get aborted by the VMware Tools service init script.If this occurs during a system shutdown, the fallacious ‘kill’ operation of the other process with the same (reused) PID might affect the orderly shutdown of another system service.This issue is resolved in this release.
The VMware Tools process might take a long time and consume 100% CPU of a core in a Linux OS with many IPv6 routesPrior to VMware Tools 10.3.0, gathering network adapter information in a Linux guest OS with many IPv6 routes was a time-consuming process with 100% use of the CPU of a core. The exported data contained only a maximum of 100 routes. IPv4 routes took precedence over IPv6, leading to data loss in reporting IPv6 routes. If there were more than 100 IPv4 routes, IPv6 routes were not reported.This performance issue has been resolved in this release. The default routes gathering behavior can be overridden by configuring the values in the /etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf file:[guestinfo] max-ipv4-routes=0 max-ipv6-routes=0

Note: If they are not manually set or an invalid value (over 100 or less than 0) is set, 'max-ipv4-routes' and 'max-ipv6-routes' is set to 100 by default. It can be set to 0 to disable the data collection.

This issue is resolved in this release.
Installation of the libvmtools package might fail the installation of VMware Tools
- When the package "libvmtools0" is installed in SUSE Linux 12 and open-vm-tools is not installed, the VMware Tools installer fails. This is set to prevent an incomplete installation. Users had to uninstall both open-vm-tools and libvmtools0 to install VMware Tools.