CVE-2020-3992: VMware ESXi OpenSLP Use-After-Free Vulnerability

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. Actively exploited: in CISA KEV since 2021-11-03. EPSS: 83% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

OpenSLP as used in VMware ESXi (7.0 before ESXi_7.0.1-0.0.16850804, 6.7 before ESXi670-202010401-SG, 6.5 before ESXi650-202010401-SG) has a use-after-free issue. A malicious actor residing in the management network who has access to port 427 on an ESXi machine may be able to trigger a use-after-free in the OpenSLP service resulting in remote code execution.

Affected products

• VMware Cloud Foundation: from 3.0, before 3.10.1.2 (fixed in 3.10.1.2); from 4.0, before 4.1.0.1 (fixed in 4.1.0.1)
• VMware ESXi: version 6.5 only; version 6.7 only; version 7.0.0 only

Published 2020-10-20. Last modified 2026-08-12.