CVE-2012-1516: VMware Esx

Critical severity, CVSS 9.9. EPSS: 3.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The VMX process in VMware ESXi 3.5 through 4.1 and ESX 3.5 through 4.1 does not properly handle RPC commands, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (memory overwrite and process crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code on the host OS via vectors involving data pointers.

Affected products

• VMware Esx: version 3.5 only; version 4.0 only; version 4.1 only
• VMware ESXi: version 3.5 only; version 4.0 only; version 4.1 only

Published 2012-05-04. Last modified 2026-06-16.