CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3999 — Vmware Workstation security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

VMware ESXi (7.0 prior to ESXi70U1c-17325551), VMware Workstation (16.x prior to 16.0 and 15.x prior to 15.5.7), VMware Fusion (12.x prior to 12.0 and 11.x prior to 11.5.7) and VMware Cloud Foundation contain a denial of service vulnerability due to improper input validation in GuestInfo. A malicious actor with normal user privilege access to a virtual machine can crash the virtual machine's vmx process leading to a denial of service condition.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-12-21
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • vmware / workstation
  • vmware / esxi / 7.0
  • vmware / fusion

Showing 3 representative product identities from 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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