Vulnerability Analysis of CVE-2025-22226 Information Disclos...

[carlospolop]

🤖 Automated Content Update

This PR was automatically generated by the HackTricks News Bot based on a technical blog post.

📝 Source Information

• Blog URL: https://nccgroup.com/research/vulnerability-analysis-of-cve-2025-22226
• Blog Title: Vulnerability Analysis of CVE-2025-22226: Information Disclosure Due to an OOB Read in VMware HGFS
• Suggested Section: Binary Exploitation > Common Exploiting Problems > VM Escape Chains, as a new VMware HGFS OOB Read / CVE-2025-22226 ASLR Bypass page

🎯 Content Summary

Vulnerability, impact, affected versions, and research scope

CVE-2025-22226 is an information-disclosure vulnerability in VMware's Host Guest File Sharing (HGFS) implementation. A guest with administrative control can communicate with the host-side vmware-vmx.exe process on VMware Workstation, or vmx on ESXi, through VMware's guest-to-host Backdoor/RPCI/TCLO mechanisms. A malformed HGFS session-creation packet causes the VMX process to read b...

🔧 Technical Details

Backdoor/RPCI/TCLO event-loop abuse: A guest can reach host-side VMware services by issuing Backdoor operations with the magic value 0x564D5868 and ports 0x5658 or 0x5659. RPC requires opening a channel, sending the command size and data, receiving the response size and data, signaling receive completion, and closing the channel. TCLO is stateful and event-driven rather than a simple request/response protocol, so an exploit must respond to host messages in the expected order, register the required application/channel, and send the HGFS message only after the correct poll, registration, and command sequence. Opening and closing selected Backdoor channels, together with variable-length SetGuestInfo data, can groom the host VMX heap.

HGFS operation-specific length-validation bypass: In the HGFS session-creation path for operation 41, HGFS_OP_CREATE_SESSION_V4, the packe...

🤖 Agent Actions

Plan:

1. Inspect the repository and at least five relevant binary-exploitation/virtualization pages.
2. Compare existing coverage with the supplied research and verify the primary source.
3. Select one best existing page or create a narrowly scoped page only if necessary.
4. Implement concise, cited technical content and validate links, formatting, and the diff.
   Repository review shows the existing organization already treats hypervisor exploitation as child pages beneath Common Exploiting Problems. The VMware HGFS technique is distinct from the existing PVSCSI corruption chain and QEMU/KVM page, so I’m proceeding with one focused new page, a parent-page reference, and a SUMMARY entry.
   Implementation is complete. I’m now running repository-level validation, including mdBook generation, to catch broken navigation/includes rather than relying only on Markdown inspection.
   Implemented the HackTricks update:

• Added src/binary-exploitation/vmware-hgfs-oob-read-aslr-bypass.md
  • Backdoor/RPCI/TCLO transport and event-loop handling
  • HGFS operation-specific length confusion
  • One-byte payload OOB read
  • Heap grooming and VMX ASLR bypass
  • Patch-diffing workflow and corrected validation invariant
  • Numbered citations crediting Alex Zaviyalov and primary sources
• Added VM escape navigation links to common-exploiting-problems.md.
• Added the new page to src/SUMMARY.md.
• Verified references, relative links, citations, forbidden-source absence, Markdown structure, and git diff --check.

mdbook build could not run because mdbook is not installed in the environment.

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This PR was automatically created by the HackTricks Feed Bot. Please review the changes carefully before merging.

[carlospolop]

🔗 Additional Context

Original Blog Post: https://nccgroup.com/research/vulnerability-analysis-of-cve-2025-22226

Content Categories: Based on the analysis, this content was categorized under "Binary Exploitation > Common Exploiting Problems > VM Escape Chains, as a new VMware HGFS OOB Read / CVE-2025-22226 ASLR Bypass page".

Repository Maintenance:

• MD Files Formatting: 1033 files processed

Review Notes:

• This content was automatically processed and may require human review for accuracy
• Check that the placement within the repository structure is appropriate
• Verify that all technical details are correct and up-to-date
• All .md files have been checked for proper formatting (headers, includes, etc.)

Bot Version: HackTricks News Bot v1.0