VENOM Bug In QEMU Escapes VM Security

The latest high-profile security vulnerability affecting open-source software and impacting mass amounts of systems worldwide is dubbed VENOM.

The VENOM vulnerability was made public today by security firm CrowdStrike. VENOM is formally known as CVE-2015-3456 and is an issue with QEMU's virtual floppy disk drive code that's used by many virtualization platforms. VENOM allows for attackers to escape a virtual machine and potentially access the host and thereby gaining access to other virtual machines on the same system.

This bug is within QEMU's floppy disk controller and that code is also used by Xen, KVM, and the native QEMU client. Meanwhile, Bochs, VMware, and Microsoft Hyper-V aren't affected. This bug is vulnerable to any platform running QEMU whether it be Linux, Windows, Solaris, OS X, etc.

This major security vulnerability has been present since 2004 when the virtual floppy disk support was first added to QEMU. Those wishing to learn more details can visit the new venom.crowdstrike.com informational page.