Virtual machine escape

In computer security, virtual machine (VM) escape is the process of a program breaking out of the virtual machine on which it is running and interacting with the host operating system. In theory, a virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". In 2008, a vulnerability in VMware discovered by Core Security Technologies made VM escape possible on VMware Workstation 6.0.2 and 5.5.4. A fully working exploit labeled Cloudburst was developed by Immunity Inc. for Immunity CANVAS (commercial penetration testing tool). Cloudburst was presented in Black Hat USA 2009.

Previous known vulnerabilities

 * Xen pygrub: Command injection in grub.conf file.
 * Directory traversal vulnerability in shared folders feature for VMware
 * Directory traversal vulnerability in shared folders feature for VMware
 * Xen Para Virtualized Frame Buffer backend buffer overflow.
 * Cloudburst: VM display function in VMware
 * QEMU-KVM: PIIX4 emulation does not check if a device is hotpluggable before unplugging
 * The x86-64 kernel system-call functionality in Xen 4.1.2 and earlier
 * Oracle VirtualBox 3D acceleration multiple memory corruption
 * VENOM: buffer-overflow in QEMU's virtual floppy disk controller
 * QEMU-KVM: Heap overflow in pcnet_receive function.
 * Xen Hypervisor: Uncontrolled creation of large page mappings by PV guests
 * Xen Hypervisor: The PV pagetable code has fast-paths for making updates to pre-existing pagetable entries, to skip expensive re-validation in safe cases (e.g. clearing only Access/Dirty bits). The bits considered safe were too broad, and not actually safe.
 * Xen Hypervisor: Disallow L3 recursive pagetable for 32-bit PV guests
 * CVE-2017-5715, 2017-5753, 2017-5754: The Spectre and Meltdown hardware vulnerabilities, a cache side-channel attack on CPU level (Rogue Data Cache Load (RDCL)), allow a rogue process to read all memory of a computer, even outside the memory assigned to a virtual machine
 * Hyper-V Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
 * Hyper-V Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
 * VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion: SVGA driver contains buffer overflow that may allow guests to execute code on hosts
 * VMware Workstation, Fusion: Heap buffer-overflow vulnerability in VMNAT device that may allow a guest to execute code on the host
 * VMware Workstation, Horizon View : Multiple out-of-bounds read issues via Cortado ThinPrint may allow a guest to execute code or perform a Denial of Service on the Windows OS
 * Oracle VirtualBox: shared memory interface by the VGA allows read and writes on the host OS
 * VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion: Uninitialized stack memory usage in the vmxnet3 virtual network adapter.
 * "Microarchitectural Data Sampling" (MDS) attacks: Similar to above Spectre and Meltdown attacks, this cache side-channel attack on CPU level allows to read data across VMs and even data of the host system. Sub types: Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling (MSBDS), Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling (MFBDS) = Zombieload, Microarchitectural Load Port Data Sampling (MLPDS), and Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM)
 * ,, , , Windows Hyper-V Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
 * Xen Hypervisor and Citrix Hypervisor: Allows guest virtual machines to compromise the host system (denial of service and rights escalation)
 * (critical), : Windows 10 and VMWare Workstation using AMD Radeon graphics cards using Adrenalin driver: attacker in guest system can use pixel shader to cause memory error on the host system, injecting malicious code to the host system and execute it.
 * ZombieLoad, ZombieLoad v2, Vector Register Sampling (VRS), Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), Transactional Asynchronous Abort (TAA), CacheOut, L1D Eviction Sampling (L1DES): L1 cache side attacks on CPU level allow virtual machines to read memory outside of their sandbox
 * CVE-2020-3962, CVE-2020-3963, CVE-2020-3964, CVE-2020-3965, CVE-2020-3966, CVE-2020-3967, CVE-2020-3968, CVE-2020-3969, CVE-2020-3970, CVE-2020-3971: VMware ESXi, Workstation Pro / Player, Fusion Pro, Cloud Foundation: Vulnerabilities in SVGA, graphics shader, USB driver, xHCI/EHCI, PVNVRAM, and vmxnet3 can cause virtual machine escape