CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3966 — Vmware Cloud Foundation security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

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.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-06-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • vmware / cloud_foundation
  • vmware / fusion
  • vmware / workstation
  • vmware / esxi / 6.5

Showing 4 representative product identities from 180 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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