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 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 Workstation Pro/Player contains a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability that exists in the vstor2 driver. Successful exploitation of this issue may allow host users with normal user privileges to trigger a denial-of-service in a Windows host machine.