VMware addressed a high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-20854, in VMware Workstation.

VMware fixed a high-severity privilege escalation flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-20854, that impacts Workstation.

An attacker can exploit the vulnerability to delete arbitrary files on Workstation version 17.x for Windows OS. 

“An arbitrary file deletion vulnerability in VMware Workstation was privately reported to VMware. Updates are available to remediate this vulnerability in the affected VMware product.” reads the advisory published by the virtualization giant.

The issue was reported by Frederik Reiter of Cirosec GmbH, it has been rated with a CVSSv3 base score of 7.8.

Cirosec plans to release technical details soon, meantime, it urges customers to patch their systems. The security firm explained in a Tweet that the arbitrary file deletion vulnerability (CVE-2023-20854) allows local privilege escalation to SYSTEM.

VMware Workstation contains an arbitrary file deletion vulnerability (CVE-2023-20854), allowing local privilege escalation to SYSTEM. Thanks to our colleague Frederik. We advise our customers to patch their systems. Technical details will be announced.https://t.co/8RbRfUSK51— cirosec GmbH (@cirosec) February 3, 2023Recently another flaw in VMware vRealize Log Insight, tracked as CVE-2022-31706 (CVSS base 9.8/10), made the headlines after Horizon3 security researchers released proof-of-concept (PoC) code.

The PoC exploit code will trigger a series of flaws in vRealize Log to achieve remote code execution on vulnerable installs.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, privilege escalation)
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