VMware fixed a high-severity bug in vCenter Server

VMware this week addressed a severe vulnerability in vCenter Server that could lead to arbitrary code execution.

VMware on Thursday released security patches to address a code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-31680 (CVSS score of 7.2), in vCenter Server.

The security issue is an unsafe deserialization vulnerability that resides in the platform services controller (PSC).

“The vCenter Server contains an unsafe deserialisation vulnerability in the PSC (Platform services controller). VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 7.2.” reads the advisory published by the company. “A malicious actor with admin access on vCenter server may exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system that hosts the vCenter Server.”

This vulnerability impacts only vCenter Server 6.5 with an external PSC, it was addressed with the release of VMware vCenter Server 6.5 U3u.

The flaw was reported by Cisco Talos researcher Marcin Noga.

Reported by Cisco Talos security researcher Marcin Noga, the vulnerability was addressed with the release of VMware vCenter Server 6.5 U3u.

VMware also addressed a a null-pointer dereference vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-31681 (CVSS score 3.8), in the VMware ESXi bare metal hypervisor.

A threat actor with privileges within the VMX process only, may create a denial of service condition on the host.

The issue was reported by VictorV (Tangtianwen) of Cyber Kunlun Lab.

The virtualization giant addressed the vulnerability with the release of versions ESXi70U3sf-20036586, ESXi670-202210101-SG, and ESXi650-202210101-SG. The company added that Cloud Foundation (ESXi) is also impacted by this issue.

The company is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting the above vulnerabilities.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, vCenter Server)

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