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Can a VM exploit another VM in ESXi?

R

Red Squirrel

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Nov 29, 2009
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I've been setting up this VM with tons of spyware and crap just for fun and games (and to use as a VM if I get one of those "microsoft" calls) and someone told me there's a program/virus called metasploit that can be used in a VM to exploit other VMs on the server, I never heard of this before, is this true? The VM is on a different vlan and pretty much everything but internet IP ranges is blocked in pfsense for that vlan.

Is it really possible for that vm to infect the rest of my network or other VMs on that server?
 
Metasploit isn't a virus, its an "exploitation framework" of sorts. It's used by alot of script kiddies and professionals to test the latest and greatest vulnerabilities in software. I don't keep up to date with Metasploit or VM security very much but I presume he's talking about some old vulnerability thats most likely been patched. If you were running an out of date esxi with known vulnerablities, there's a very good chance Metasploit would have working exploits for it in its database.
 
Depends on your hypervisor and patch level. There have been some break-ins for the hypervisor itself for almost of them (windows/linux/esx) as they're all potentially running services that listen on the network that can be exploited (or you can turn those off...). As for a vm-vm exploit without networking, it's only happened once on KVM/Xen, and required specific workloads in both VMs to take advantage of a cache coloring artifact on intel cpus, and was patched pretty much immediately.
 
Red Squirrel said:
That sounds more reassuring, so as long as I keep it updated I should be safe then?
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Seems like that is the case to me. To go VM to VM you would need to be able to attack private memory or access files in storage that aren't yours.
 
DeChache said:
Seems like that is the case to me. To go VM to VM you would need to be able to attack private memory or access files in storage that aren't yours.
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Which the VMM (in every hypervisor) prevents you from doing by simple design. It's effectively impossible, minus the one random one I mentioned prior.
 
Aren't there some vmci exploits? Granted you have to have vmci enabled on esxi to even open yourself to that attack.
 
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