CVE-2023-20867

What is affected

Vendor	VMware
Product	Tools
Weakness	CWE-287

The vulnerability

VMware Tools contains an authentication bypass vulnerability in the vgauth module. A fully compromised ESXi host can force VMware Tools to fail to authenticate host-to-guest operations, impacting the confidentiality and integrity of the guest virtual machine. An attacker must have root access over ESXi to exploit this vulnerability.

Required action

Apply updates per vendor instructions.

US federal civilian agencies were required to act by 14 July 2023 under BOD 22-01. The deadline is a compliance date, not a measure of severity — it says nothing about how dangerous the flaw is to anyone else.

Where this comes from

Every field on this page is taken from the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, last synced 12 Nov 2026, 00:29. Nothing here is our own assessment. For the technical scoring, see the NVD record below.

NVD record ↗ CVE.org record ↗