A security update has been released by VMware to patch two vulnerabilities in VMware Aria Operations for Logs products, which were previously called vRealize Log Insight. VMware vRealize Log Insight products had multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities that were addressed in January which could be exploited together in an attack chain. This new update addresses one critical flaw and one important (high) severity vulnerability, neither of which are believed to have been exploited in the wild before an official patch was released. VMware have released a security advisory and an article about these flaws and their potential exploits, including which customers are most affected. 

The first vulnerability addressed in this update, CVE-2023-20864, is rated as a critical severity flaw and has a CVSS base score of 9.8. This deserialisation vulnerability causes untrusted data to be deserialised without sufficient validity checking of the resulting data. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this flaw to trigger arbitrary code execution with root level privileges if they have access to the network the vulnerable system is on. The second flaw, CVE-2023-2065, is a high severity vulnerability with a CVSS base score of 7.2. This is a command injection flaw which if exploited could allow for an attacker who has gained administrative privileges to execute commands as root.  

 VMware Aria Operations for Logs version 8.10.2 is affected by both of these vulnerabilities, however other versions are only affected by the lower severity command injection flaw. The most recent update available for VMware Aria Operations for Logs products is version 8.12, which can be downloaded from the VMware website. Users operating within the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 4.x environment are also affected by these two flaws, so will also need to apply the VMware Aria Operations for Logs version 8.12 update. To apply this update, users will first have to upgrade to VCF version 4.5 or higher, where the VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager UI can be utilised to apply the updates. This is not possible for VCF version 4.4 or before where the SDDC Manager does not manage upgrades any longer.