An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited.

Variant CVE-2017-5753 triggers the speculative execution by performing a bounds-check bypass. It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory accesses may cause allocation into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to cross the syscall boundary and read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks.

VMware Workstation (12.x before 12.5.8) and Fusion (8.x before 8.5.9) contain a guest RPC NULL pointer dereference vulnerability. Successful exploitation of this issue may allow attackers with normal user privileges to crash their VMs.

VMware ESXi 6.5 without patch ESXi650-201707101-SG, ESXi 6.0 without patch ESXi600-201706101-SG, ESXi 5.5 without patch ESXi550-201709101-SG, Workstation (12.x before 12.5.3), Fusion (8.x before 8.5.4) contain a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability. This issue occurs when handling guest RPC requests. Successful exploitation of this issue may allow attackers with normal user privileges to crash their VMs.

VMware ESXi 6.5 without patch ESXi650-201703410-SG, 6.0 U3 without patch ESXi600-201703401-SG, 6.0 U2 without patch ESXi600-201703403-SG, 6.0 U1 without patch ESXi600-201703402-SG, 5.5 without patch ESXi550-201703401-SG; Workstation Pro / Player 12.x prior to 12.5.5; and Fusion Pro / Fusion 8.x prior to 8.5.6 have uninitialized memory usage. This issue may lead to an information leak.

VMware Fusion 8.x before 8.5 on OS X, when System Integrity Protection (SIP) is enabled, allows local users to determine kernel memory addresses and bypass the kASLR protection mechanism via unspecified vectors.