Background

VMware is one of the leaders in virtualization nowadays. They offer VMware ESXi for cloud, and VMware Workstation and Fusion for Desktops (Windows, Linux, macOS).
The technology is very well known to the public: it allows users to run unmodified guest “virtual machines”.
Often those virtual machines are not trusted, and they must be isolated.
VMware goes to a great deal to offer this isolation, especially on the ESXi product where virtual machines of different actors can potentially run on the same hardware. So a strong isolation of is paramount importance.

Recently at Pwn2Own the “Virtualization” category was introduced, and VMware was among the targets since Pwn2Own 2016.

In 2017 we successfully demonstrated a VMware escape from a guest to the host from a unprivileged account, resulting in executing code on the host, breaking out of the virtual machine.

If you escape your virtual machine environment then all isolation assurances are lost, since you are running code on the host, which controls the guests.

But how VMware works?

In a nutshell it often uses (but they are not strictly required) CPU and memory hardware virtualization technologies, so a guest virtual machine can run code at native speed most of the time.

But a modern system is not just a CPU and Memory, it also requires lot of other Hardware to work properly and be useful.

This point is very important because it will consist of one of the biggest attack surfaces of VMware: the virtualized hardware.

Virtualizing a hardware device is not a trivial task. It’s easily realized by reading any datasheet for hardware software interface for a PC hardware device.

VMware will trap on I/O access on this virtual device and it needs to emulate all those low level operations correctly, since it aims to run unmodified kernels, its emulated devices must behave as closely as possible to their real counterparts.

Furthermore if you ever used VMware you might have noticed its copy paste capabilities, and shared folders. How those are implemented?

To summarize, in this blog post we will cover quite some bugs. Both in this “backdoor” functionalities that support those “extra” services such as C&P, and one in a virtualized device.

Altough recently

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