CVE-2020-3981

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2020-10-20 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-125

Description

VMware ESXi (7.0 before ESXi_7.0.1-0.0.16850804, 6.7 before ESXi670-202008101-SG, 6.5 before ESXi650-202007101-SG), Workstation (15.x), Fusion (11.x before 11.5.6) contain an out-of-bounds read vulnerability due to a time-of-check time-of-use issue in ACPI device. A malicious actor with administrative access to a virtual machine may be able to exploit this issue to leak memory from the vmx process.

Affected products

VMware Cloud Foundation: from 3.0 before 3.10.1; from 4.0 before 4.1 — fixed in 3.10.1, 4.1
VMware ESXi: 7.0.0-1.20.16321839, 6.5-2, 6.5-650-201701001, 6.5-650-201703001, 6.5-650-201703002, 6.5-650-201704001 (+211); 7.0.0, 6.5, 6.7
VMware Fusion: from 11.0 before 11.5.6 — fixed in 11.5.6
VMware Workstation: from 15.0.0 through 15.5.6
VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion: VMware ESXi (7.0 before ESXi_7.0.1-0.0.16850804, 6.7 before ESXi670-202008101-SG, 6.5 before ESXi650-202007101-SG), Workstation (15.x), Fusion (11.x before 11.5.6)

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: VMware Cloud Foundation 3.10.1, 4.1; VMware Fusion 11.5.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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