VENOM Vulnerability Threatens Virtual Machines (Updated)
by Kelly Prevett on May 13, 2015
Today the VENOM (Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation) vulnerability, CVE 2015-3456, was announced. VENOM originates in a legacy virtual floppy disk controller from QEMU. If an attacker sends specially crafted code to the controller, it can crash the hypervisor and allow the attacker to break out of the VM to access other machines. VENOM impacts several popular virtualization platforms that include the QEMU controller, including Xen, KVM, and Oracle’s VirtualBox. Patches for QEMU and Xen are already available.