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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-4941

High
8.8/10

Summary

VMware ESXi (6.0 before ESXi600-201711101-SG, 5.5 ESXi550-201709101-SG), Workstation (12.x before 12.5.8), and Fusion (8.x before 8.5.9) contain a vulnerability that could allow an authenticated VNC session to cause a stack overflow via a specific set of VNC packets. Successful exploitation of this issue could result in remote code execution in a virtual machine via the authenticated VNC session. Note: In order for exploitation to be possible in ESXi, VNC must be manually enabled in a virtual machine's .vmx configuration file. In addition, ESXi must be configured to allow VNC traffic through the built-in firewall.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • HIGH
  • HIGH

CWE-119 - Buffer Overflow

Buffer overflow attacks involve data transit and operations exceeding the restricted memory buffer, thereby corrupting or overwriting data in adjacent memory locations. Such overflow allows the attacker to run arbitrary code or manipulate the existing code to cause privilege escalation, data breach, denial of service, system crash and even complete system compromise. Given that languages such as C and C++ lack default safeguards against overwriting or accessing data in their memory, applications utilizing these languages are most susceptible to buffer overflows attacks.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published