oss-security - CVE-2023-20867: open-vm-tools: Authentication Bypass vulnerability in the vgauth module

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Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2023 03:48:14 +0200
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Cc: VMware Security Response Center <security@...are.com>
Subject: CVE-2023-20867: open-vm-tools: Authentication Bypass vulnerability in the vgauth module

Hi,

This was brought to linux-distros on June 6 with "scheduled public
disclosure on June 13th, 2023."  There's a VMware security advisory that
says it was published on that date:

https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0013.html

and patches are available at:

https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/tree/CVE-2023-20867.patch

but the issue was wrongly never brought to oss-security (or at least I
couldn't find it) - so I am correcting this now.

Quoting from the linux-distros message:

> Description
> ==============================================================
> CVE-2023-20867: VMware Tools contains an Authentication Bypass
> vulnerability in the vgauth module. VMware has evaluated the severity
> of this issue to be in the Low severity range with a maximum CVSSv3.1
> base score of 3.9 - CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N.
> 
> Known Attack Vectors
> ==============================================================
> A fully compromised ESXi host can force VMware Tools to fail to
> authenticate host-to-guest operations, impacting the confidentiality
> and integrity of the virtual machine.

Quoting from the GitHub URL above:

> The issue has been fixed in the open-vm-tools version 12.2.5 released on
> June 13, 2023.
> 
> The following patch provided to the open-vm-tools community can be used
> to apply the security fix to previous open-vm-tools releases.
> 
> For releases 12.2.0, 12.1.5, 12.1.0, 12.0.5, 12.0.0, 11.3.5, 11.3.0
> 
>     2023-20867-Remove-some-dead-code.patch
> 
> For releases 11.1.0, 11.1.5, 11.2.0, 11.2.5
> 
>     2023-20867-Remove-some-dead-code-1110-1125.patch
> 
> For releases 11.0.0, 11.0.5
> 
>     2023-20867-Remove-some-dead-code-1100-1105.patch
> 
> For releases 10.3.0, 10.3.5, 10.3.10
> 
>     2023-20867-Remove-some-dead-code-1030-10310.patch
> 
> The patches have been tested against the above open-vm-tools releases.
> Each applies cleanly with:
> 
> git am        for a git repository.
> patch -p2     in the top directory of an open-vm-tools source tree.

Alexander

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