vmware esxi CVE-2025-22225 vulnerability in VMware Products
Published on March 4, 2025

VMware ESXi contains an arbitrary write vulnerability. A malicious actor with privileges within the VMX process may trigger an arbitrary kernel write leading to an escape of the sandbox.

Vendor Advisory NVD

Known Exploited Vulnerability

This VMware ESXi Arbitrary Write Vulnerability is part of CISA's list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities. VMware ESXi contains an arbitrary write vulnerability. Successful exploitation allows an attacker with privileges within the VMX process to trigger an arbitrary kernel write leading to an escape of the sandbox.

The following remediation steps are recommended / required by March 25, 2025: Apply mitigations per vendor instructions, follow applicable BOD 22-01 guidance for cloud services, or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2025-22225 can be exploited with local system access, and requires user privileges. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. It has an exploitability score of 1.5 out of four. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.

Write-what-where Condition

Any condition where the attacker has the ability to write an arbitrary value to an arbitrary location, often as the result of a buffer overflow.


Products Associated with CVE-2025-22225

You can be notified by stack.watch whenever vulnerabilities like CVE-2025-22225 are published in these products:

VMware Esxi
 
VMware Cloud Foundation
 
VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure
 
VMware Telco Cloud Platform
 

What versions are vulnerable to CVE-2025-22225?