Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-3966 - Race Condition vulnerability in VMWare products

047910
CVSS 3.7 - LOW
Attack vector
LOCAL
Attack complexity
HIGH
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
PARTIAL
Integrity impact
PARTIAL
Availability impact
PARTIAL
local
high complexity
vmware
CWE-362

Summary

VMware ESXi (7.0 before ESXi_7.0.0-1.20.16321839, 6.7 before ESXi670-202004101-SG and 6.5 before ESXi650-202005401-SG), Workstation (15.x before 15.5.2), and Fusion (11.x before 11.5.2) contain a heap-overflow due to a race condition issue in the USB 2.0 controller (EHCI). A malicious actor with local access to a virtual machine may be able to exploit this vulnerability to execute code on the hypervisor from a virtual machine. Additional conditions beyond the attacker's control must be present for exploitation to be possible.

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Leveraging Race Conditions
    This attack targets a race condition occurring when multiple processes access and manipulate the same resource concurrently and the outcome of the execution depends on the particular order in which the access takes place. The attacker can leverage a race condition by "running the race", modifying the resource and modifying the normal execution flow. For instance a race condition can occur while accessing a file, the attacker can trick the system by replacing the original file with his version and cause the system to read the malicious file.
  • Leveraging Time-of-Check and Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions
    This attack targets a race condition occurring between the time of check (state) for a resource and the time of use of a resource. The typical example is the file access. The attacker can leverage a file access race condition by "running the race", meaning that he would modify the resource between the first time the target program accesses the file and the time the target program uses the file. During that period of time, the attacker could do something such as replace the file and cause an escalation of privilege.