In computer security, virtual machine escape is the process of a program breaking out of the virtual machine on which it is running and interacting with the hostoperating system. 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 . Cloudburst was presented in Black Hat USA 2009.
Previous known vulnerabilities
Directory traversal vulnerability in shared folders feature for VMware
Directory traversal vulnerability in shared folders feature for VMware
Cloudburst: VM display function in VMware
The x86-64 kernel system-call functionality in Xen 4.1.2 and earlier
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. The bits considered safe were too broad, and not actually safe.
Xen Hypervisor: Disallow L3 recursive pagetable for 32-bit PV guests
CVA-2017-5715, 2017-5753, 2017-5754: The Spectre and Meltdown hardware vulnerabilities, a cache side-channel attack on CPU level, allow a rogue process to read all memory of a computer, even outside the memory assigned to a virtual machine
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
: "Microarchitectural Data Sampling" 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, Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling = Zombieload, Microarchitectural Load Port Data Sampling, and Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory
: Xen Hypervisor and Citrix Hypervisor: Allows guest virtual machines to compromise the host system
, : 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, Microarchitectural Data Sampling, Transactional Asynchronous Abort, CacheOut, L1D Eviction Sampling : 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
