CVE-2009-2267: Mishandled exception on page fault in VMware

Tavis Ormandy and myself have recently released an advisory for CVE-2009-2267.

This is a vulnerability in VMware's virtual CPU which can lead to privilege escalation in a guest. All VMware virtualisation products were affected, including in hardware virtualisation mode.

In a VMware guest, in the general case, unprivileged (Ring 3) code runs without VMM intervention until an exception or interrupt occurs. An exception to this is Virtual-8086 mode (VM86) where VMware will perform CPU emulation.

When VMware was emulating a far call instruction in VM86 mode, it was using supervisory access to push the CS and IP registers. Because of this, if this operation raisee a Page Fault (#PF) exception, the resulting exception code would be invalid and would have it's user/supervisor flag incorrectly set.

This can be used to confuse a Guest kernel. Moreover, VM86 mode can be used to further confuse the guest kernel because it allows an attacker to load an arbitrary value in the code segment (CS) register.

We wrote a reliable proof of concept to elevate privileges on Linux guests. It turned out to be very easy because of the PNP BIOS recovery code.

For further details, check our advisory, VMware's advisory and the non weaponized PoC (vmware86.c, vmware86.tar.gz), including Tavis' cool CODE32 macro.

Note that VMware silently patches their products until all all of them are updated and then releases an advisory. If you have updated VMware Workstation a few month ago, you were already protected against this vulnerability.

In theory, VMware's Virtual CPU flaws could be treated like Intel or AMD errata and worked around in operating systems. In practice, since VMware's software can be updated, this is unlikely to happen. Moreover, VMware doesn't release full details that could be used to produce work arounds.

If you like virtual CPU vulnerabilities, I suggest that you have a look at Derek Soeder's awesome advisory from last year.