Some vulnerabilities have been reported in VMware, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or to potentially compromise a user's system, and by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions or to gain escalated privileges.

1) An error in the "vmware-authd" daemon can be exploited to terminate the "vmware-authd" process via e.g. an overly long "USER" string sent to TCP port 912.

Successful exploitation allows e.g. denying virtual machine access to local unprivileged users.

2) An error in the IOCTL handler of the vmci.sys driver can be exploited to gain SYSTEM privileges on host or guest systems.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may require administrative privileges.

3) An error in the VMnc codec (vmnc.dll) when handling RFB message types above 3 can be exploited to trigger a memory corruption via a specially crafted video file.

4) A boundary error exists in the VMnc codec (vmnc.dll) when handling ICM_DECOMPRESS driver messages. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow via an overly large "dwSize" element defined in a specially crafted RIFF chunk.

Successful exploitation of vulnerabilities #3 and #4 may allow execution of arbitrary code.

5) An error in the ACE shared folders functionality can be exploited to enable a shared folder in the guest without administrative privileges.

NOTE: This vulnerability affects VMware ACE only.

6) An unspecified error in the virtual machine display function can be exploited from a guest operating system to potentially run arbitrary code on the host.

Please see vendor's advisory for a list of affected products and versions.

Solution
Update to a fixed version. Please see vendor advisory for additional information regarding VMware Tools update requirements.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Laurent Gaffié
2) Nikita Tarakanov, Positive Technologies Research Team
3, 4) Aaron Portnoy, TippingPoint DVLabs
5) The vendor credits Emmanouel Kellinis of KPMG London.
6) Reported by the vendor.

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
VMSA-2009-0005:
http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2009/000054.html

VMSA-2009-0006:
http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2009/000055.html

Laurent Gaffié:
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/7647

Positive Technologies Research Team:
http://en.securitylab.ru/lab/PT-2008-05

TippingPoint:
http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/advisory/TPTI-09-01
http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/advisory/TPTI-09-02

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area