Some security issues have been reported in VMware Workstation, Player, and Fusion, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.

1) Race conditions within the "vmware-mount" utility when handling temporary files during the mounting process can be exploited to e.g. create files or directories.

2) An error within the "vmware-mount" utility when loading libraries can be exploited execute arbitrary code with root privileges.

Note: The security issues only affect the Linux version of VMware Workstation and Player and VMware Fusion for Mac OS/X.

Solution
Update to a patched version.
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Dan Rosenberg
2) The vendor credits Martin Carpenter

Original Advisory
VMSA-2010-0018:
http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2010/000112.html

1) http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/drosenbe/research.html

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers