A vulnerability has been identified in various VMware products, which could be exploited by attackers to bypass security restrictions and gain unauthorized access to the host's complete file system. This issue is caused by a directory traversal error in the shared folders feature (enabled by default in Workstation 5, Player 1, and ACE 1) when handling UTF-8 sequences in file or directory names, which could be exploited by an attacker with access to the virtual (guest) system to write and read arbitrary files on the underlying (host) operating system by executing certain commands (e.g. "put") with specially crafted arguments containing the "+.+./" sequence, potentially leading to a system compromise.
Note: Exploitation requires at least one folder to be configured as shared between the host and guest.
Credits
Vulnerability reported by Gerardo Richarte (Core Security Technologies).
ChangeLog
2008-02-26 : Initial release
2008-03-17 : Updated Solution
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