CVE-2025-41244

A flaw was found in VMWare open-vm-tools. A malicious actor with non-administrative privileges on a guest Virtual Machine (VM) could exploit this vulnerability to gain root privileges on the VM. The issue lies in the service-discovery plugin logic, which can execute attacker-controlled binaries from writable paths such as /tmp. Exploitation requires the open-vm-tools-sdmp package to be installed and guest service discovery to be enabled.

This vulnerability was rated Important because, while it requires local code execution, the exploitation is trivial and leads to full compromise of privileged contexts such as root. The flaw lies in VMware’s service-discovery logic, which can execute attacker-controlled binaries from writable paths like /tmp. An unprivileged user who runs a process with a listening socket can have it invoked by the privileged discovery routine, resulting in arbitrary code execution. Only systems with guest service discovery enabled are affected; those without this feature configured are not exposed.

Exploitation requires the service-discovery plugin (open-vm-tools-sdmp) to be installed. Red Hat CoreOS (RHCOS) is not affected, as it only ships the standard open-vm-tools package, which by default, does not include the -sdmp subpackage. Customers concerned about exposure should use the command rpm -q open-vm-tools-sdmp to verify whether the impacted package is present on their systems.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

There are two main ways to eliminate the risk of this vulnerability:

1. Temporary - Disable the guest service discovery features: Disable the servicediscovery plugin in the config or by running the command vmware-toolbox-cmd config set servicediscovery disabled true then restart the system.
2. More permanent - Uninstall open-vm-tools-sdmp then restart the system.