VMware Tools Flaw Let Attackers Escalate Privileges

Two high vulnerabilities have been discovered in VMware Tools, which were assigned with CVE-2023-34057 and CVE-2023-34058. These vulnerabilities were associated with Local Privilege Escalation and SAML Token Signature Bypass.

The severities of these vulnerabilities are 7.5 (High) and 7.8 (High), respectively. One of these vulnerabilities existed in macOS. However,  VMware has released patches and security advisories for fixing these vulnerabilities.

CVE-2023-34057: Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

A threat actor with local user privilege to a guest virtual machine can exploit this vulnerability and gain elevated privileges within the virtual machine. The severity of this vulnerability is given as 7.8 (High). 

CVE-2023-34058: SAML Token Signature Bypass

As a prerequisite, a threat actor requires “guest operations privilege” to exploit this vulnerability. This privilege controls the ability to interact with files and applications inside a virtual machine’s guest operating system for exploiting this vulnerability. 

A threat actor with this privilege can exploit this vulnerability on a target virtual machine and elevate their privileges if that target virtual machine has been assigned with a more privileged Guest Alias. The severity for this vulnerability has been given as 7.5 (High).

Affected Products

Product	Version	Running On	CVE Identifier	CVSSv3	Severity	Fixed Version	Workarounds	Additional Documentation
VMware Tools	12.x.x, 11.x.x, 10.3.x	macOS	CVE-2023-34057	7.8	Important	12.1.1	None	None
VMware Tools	12.x.x, 11.x.x, 10.3.x	Windows	CVE-2023-34057	N/A	N/A	Unaffected	N/A	N/A
VMware Tools	12.x.x, 11.x.x, 10.3.x	macOS	CVE-2023-34058	N/A	N/A	Unaffected	N/A	N/A
VMware Tools	12.x.x, 11.x.x, 10.3.x	Windows	CVE-2023-34058	7.5	Important	12.3.5	None	None

Users of these products are recommended to upgrade to the latest version in order to prevent these vulnerabilities from getting exploited.

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