CVE-2020-3972 Denial of service in VMware Tools for macOS

What is CVE-2020-3972?

CVE-2020-3972 is a low-severity denial of service vulnerability in VMware Tools for macOS, published on 19 Jun 2020. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

VMware Tools for macOS (11.x.x and prior before 11.1.1) contains a denial-of-service vulnerability in the Host-Guest File System (HGFS) implementation. Successful exploitation of this issue may allow attackers with non-admin privileges on guest macOS virtual machines to create a denial-of-service condition on their own VMs.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-3972?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Vmware Tools.

How do I fix CVE-2020-3972?

No fix has been published for CVE-2020-3972 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2020-3972 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-3972 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in VMware Tools for macOS

• CVE-2023-34057 Privilege escalation in VMware Tools High 7.8
• CVE-2016-7079 Null dereference in n/a High 7.8
• CVE-2016-7080 Null dereference in n/a High 7.8
• CVE-2022-22977 XML external entity in VMware Tools for Windows High 7.1
• CVE-2019-5522 Information disclosure in VMware Tools for Windows High 7.1

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-5w32-6vq2-mmh8.