VMware shared folders - sharing more than they need.

Tuesday, February 26. 2008

VMware shared folders - sharing more than they need.

It appears VMware has known about a critical bug in their desktop virtualisation software for some time, but have yet to release an update.

This includes all their desktop products; but not their server products (ESX, Server).

Core Security has released Proof of Concept code after they claim to have been trying to get VMWare to acknowledge the problem for around 4 months. Their press release gives more background information.

VMware has now at least acknowledged the problem.

To date, the fix is disable shared folders where guests are not trusted.

To be honest, I'd be more concerned if it effected the Server and ESX products (likely to have many more untrusted guests), though having said that, you can expect malware/trojan/virus writers will add this to their bag of tricks to try.

I would recommend disabling shared folders and relying on network file transfers in the interim (ie: sftp, scp, ftp to the host).

Posted by Matt in Apps, Linux, Windows at 20:22 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: apps, Linux, security, windows

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This seems similar in concept to the Windows SMB file sharing bugs a few years ago. It's another variant on the "file server can serve the wrong files" theme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetTop

The NetTop project uses SE Linux to constrain VMWare images to prevent them from doing such things, it's one of many ways of addressing this issue.

Of course another option is to just use Samba to share the files in question (and hope that Samba doesn't have a security flaw).

Contrary to some claims it doesn't demonstrate an inherent flaw in virtual environments (the recent Linux Xen bug however did that).

#1 Russell Coker (Homepage) on 2008-02-27 11:50 (Reply)

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