CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-41226 — VMware ESXi contains a denial-of-service vulnerability that occurs when performing a guest operation

Medium CVSS 6.8

VMware ESXi contains a denial-of-service vulnerability that occurs when performing a guest operation. A malicious actor with guest operation privileges on a VM, who is already authenticated through vCenter Server or ESXi may trigger this issue to create a denial-of-service condition of guest VMs with VMware Tools running and guest operations enabled.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.8 (3.1)
Published
2025-05-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

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Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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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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