VMware Player 14.1.3

# New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems

# New Features in VMware Player

* Virtual Machine with Easy Install — Create a virtual machine and install any supported guest operating system with Easy Install.
* New User Interface — Use the new user interface to create virtual machines and edit virtual machine settings.
* Windows 7 — Create and run Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit virtual machines using VMware Workstation. VMware Workstation has been enhanced for performance and to take advantage of the new Windows 7 features including Live Thumbnails and Aero Peek.
* Aero Glass — A new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) graphics driver has been developed for Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines. The WDDM driver can display the Windows Aero user interface, OpenGL 1.4, and Shader Model 3.0. For more information on the VMware recommended graphics hardware, see the VMware Workstation User's Manual.
* Windows XP Mode Compatible — Import a Windows XP Mode virtual machine using VMware Player 3.0 and run the virtual machine without being prompted to enter a Windows XP license key. VMware Player enables the Windows XP Mode virtual machine to take advantage of more than one processor, render high-end graphics, integrate seamlessly with Unity, and transfer files easily with drag and drop, and shared folders. VMware Player also has the ability to run concurrently with Windows XP Mode.
* 3D Graphics Improvements for Windows XP guests — OpenGL 2.1 and Shader Model 3.0 support is now available for Windows XP virtual machines. The XPDM (SVGAII) graphics driver works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. However, only Windows XP virtual machines install the XPDM graphics driver by default. To switch graphics drivers in the guest operating system, see How to Switch Between SVGAII and WDDM Drivers.
* Multiple-Monitor Display — Virtual machines can now take advantage of multiple monitors.
* Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) — ALSA significantly improves the sound of virtual machines running on a Linux host and streams the audio from each virtual machine on a separate channel so that multiple virtual machines can be heard simultaneously.
* Drag and Drop Enhancements — Drag and drop enhancements include support for new file types including images and formatted text and extend the existing ability to drag and drop files to a broader set of guest and host operating systems.
* On-Demand VMware Tools Download — On-demand download capability provides the latest VMware Tools for the guest operating system. This feature reduces the overall download size of VMware products by downloading only the required set of VMware Tools and and enables VMware to release new versions frequently.
* Virtual Printing — Print from virtual machines without mapping network printers or installing printer drivers in the virtual machine. With virtual printing enabled in the virtual machine setting, all of the printers installed on the host operating system are available in the guest operating system. This functionality is enabled through a partnership with ThinPrint, Inc.
* VIX API for VMware Player — Software vendors can use the VIX functionality to add their own interface to the VMware Player menu bar.

VMware provides new support for the following guest operating system on Player 2.5.3:

* Ubuntu 9.04 is fully supported.

Following are the resolved issues in Player 2.5.3:

Security Fixes

* New: Third party library libpng updated to 1.2.35. Several flaws were discovered in the way the third-party libpng library handled uninitialized pointers. An attacker could create a PNG image file in such a way, that when loaded by an application linked to libpng, it could cause the application to crash or execute arbitrary code at the privilege level of the user running the application. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-0040 to this issue.

Miscellaneous

* Sometimes the VMwareUser.exe process on a Windows guest uses 100 percent of the CPU after a drag and drop operation because the operation has not been terminated properly.
* The Etoken encryption USB device from Alladin Systems is not recognized in the preboot environment for a Windows XP virtual machine.
* Player virtual machines that were converted from ESX virtual machines might fail if the display is set to 8-bit color.
* After installing and configuring VMware Tools on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, the sound does not work after restarting the guest.
* On a Windows XP Service Pack 2 guest, the Hardware Wizard stops responding when installing Logitech QuickCAm Pro 9000.
* Add enhanced SVGA and mouse drivers to support X.Org server version 1.6.
* A WLK DiskStress test fails with data corruption error on LSI Logic virtual device.
* Moving files between shared folders or mapped drives in Windows gueststhat point to the same directory on the host, cause the files to disappear.
* Pressing any keys while grabbing (for example, Ctrl+g) or ungrabbing become stuck on Ubuntu 9.04 host.
* Player has been updated to power on the latest Microsoft Virtual PC files (.vhd). VMware recommends that you create a copy or linked clone of the image. If you do not create a copy, you cannot run the original virtual machine in VPC after running it in Player, because the virtual hardware layer has been modified.
* Performance is slow when opening a Shared Folder for the first time in a Player Windows guest.
* Drag and drop stops working when color depth is set to 16-bit on a Player guest.
* When moving a virtual machine from a later version of Player to a 2.5.x version of Player, the taskbar icon indicates that a more current version of VMware Tools is available and that VMware Tools should be updated.
* NAT networking does not work on the latest Windows operating systems.
* After uninstalling VMware Tools from an Ubuntu 8.10 guest, restart the guest to re-establish the netwok connection.
* Default suspend and resume scripts do not activate or deactivate the network interfaces correctly in a 32-bit Ubuntu 9.04 guests.

With this release of VMware Player, certain new features and support have been added.
Support for New Guest Operating Systems
VMware provides support for the following operating systems for Player 2.5.2:

* Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2
* Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
* openSUSE 11.1
* Ubuntu 8.10
* Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

VMware provides experimental support to the following operating systems for Player:

* Asianux Server 3 Service Pack 1
* Fedora 11
* FreeBSD 7.1
* Mandriva Linux 2009
* Microsoft Windows 7
* Novell SLE11.0
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8
* Sun Solaris 10 Update 6
* Ubuntu 9.04

* Japanese localization — A localized version of VMware Player is now available in Japanese for Windows hosts.
* Smart card support for Linux guests — Smart cards are now experimentally supported with Linux guests.
* Unity mode on Linux guests — Although support for Unity mode on Linux guests is still experimental, repainting of application windows is much improved.
* 3-D graphics — Additional improvements have been made to improve 3-D performance on Windows XP guests.

New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems

This release provides experimental support for the following operating systems:

* 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows Preinstallation environment (all versions) as a guest operating system
* 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows Recovery environment as a guest operating system
* 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu LTS 8.04.1 as a guest operating system

This release provides full support for the following operating systems in addition to those operating systems supported in previous releases:

* 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows 2008 Standard Server, Data Center, Enterprise, and Small Business Server as guest operating systems without Hyper-V
* 32-bit and 64-bit Asianux 3 as a guest operating system
* 32-bit and 64-bit CentOS 5.0-5.2 as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0-5.2 as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Update 7 (Workstation, Enterprise Server, and Advanced Server) as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and 5.2 (Advanced Platform, Desktop, and Server) as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and 10 SP1 and SP2 as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 as a guest operating system
* 32-bit and 64-bit Mandriva Linux 2008 as a guest operating system
* 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu LTS 8.04 as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris 10 Operating System for x86 Platforms, 10 5/08 (Update 5), as a guest operating system

Note: In the VMware Player Getting Started Guide, the following operating systems should not be listed as supported for this release: 32-bit and 64-bit CentOS 5.3, Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8. In addition, only Microsoft Windows 2008 operating systems without Hyper-V are supported.
Major New Features

* Unity view — Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity view, and the VMware Player window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders. You can access the virtual machine's Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host's Start or Applications menu, or by using a key combination.
* Installer bundle for Linux hosts — Installing VMware Player on Linux hosts just got a lot easier. The new bundle format provides a graphical UI wizard for most Linux operating systems. With a few mouse clicks, VMware Player is installed. For users who want a custom installation, a command-line interface provides complete control.
* Accelerated 3-D graphics on Windows XP guests — VMware Player 2.5 virtual machines now work with applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0 on Windows XP guests. Hosts can be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.

Usability Enhancements

* Full screen mode — While in full screen mode, you can now switch from one powered-on virtual machine to another.
* Suspend and exit — Both Windows and Linux hosts now support suspending the virtual machine when exiting.
* Change preferences — Set preferences, such as how devices are displayed in VMware Player.
* Expanded in-product help system — When you choose Help > Help Topics, or click a Help button in a dialog box, you have access to twice as much content as was provided in VMware Player 2.0.

Performance Improvements

* Folder sharing and dragging, dropping, copying, and pasting text and files — Transferring files between virtual machines or between host and guests using these features is up to 25 percent faster.
* Memory allocation — Change the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machine.

New Platform Capabilities

* (Experimental) Support for smart cards in virtual machines — You can plug a smart card reader into a host and insert your smart card to authenticate yourself on your host or on a guest. Smart cards can be shared between the host and guests or between guests.
* Text copy and paste enhancements — On Windows guests, you can copy and paste text in rich text format, and copy up to 4MB of text. (On Linux guests, the old limitations still apply. You can copy and paste up to 64K of plain text.)

Player 2.0.5 addresses the following security issues:

* Setting ActiveX killbit
Starting from this release, VMware has set the killbit on its ActiveX controls. Setting the killbit ensures that ActiveX controls cannot run in Internet Explorer (IE), and avoids security issues involving ActiveX controls in IE. See the KB article 240797 available from Microsoft and the related references on this topic.
Security vulnerabilities have been reported for ActiveX controls provided by VMware when run in IE. Under specific circumstances, exploitation of these ActiveX controls might result in denial-of-service or allow running of arbitrary code when the user browses a malicious Web site or opens a malicious file in IE browser. An attempt to run unsafe ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer might result in pop-up windows warning the user.
Note: IE can be configured to run unsafe ActiveX controls without prompting. VMware recommends that you retain the default settings in IE, which prompts when unsafe actions are requested.
Earlier, VMware had issued knowledge base articles, KB 5965318 and KB 9078920 on security issues with ActiveX controls.
To avoid malicious scripts that exploit ActiveX controls, do not enable unsafe ActiveX objects in your browser settings. As a best practice, do not browse untrusted Web sites as an administrator and do not click OK or Yes if prompted by IE to allow certain actions.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures has assigned the names CVE-2008-3691, CVE-2008-3692, CVE-2008-3693, CVE-2008-3694, CVE-2008-3695, CVE-2007-5438, and CVE-2008-3696 to the security issues with VMware ActiveX controls.

* Update to FreeType
FreeType 2.3.6 resolves an integer overflow vulnerability and other vulnerabilities that can allow malicious users to run arbitrary code or might cause a denial-of-service after reading a maliciously crafted file. This release updates FreeType to its latest version 2.3.7.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures has assigned the names CVE-2008-1806, CVE-2008-1807, and CVE-2008-1808 to the issues resolved in FreeType 2.3.6.

* Update to Cairo
Cairo 1.4.12 resolves an integer overflow vulnerability that can allow malicious users to run arbitrary code or might cause a denial-of-service after reading a maliciously crafted PNG file. This release updates Cairo to its latest version 1.4.14. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures has assigned the name CVE-2007-5503 to the issue resolved in Cairo 1.4.12.

VMware Player 2.0.4 addresses the following security issues:

* On Windows hosts, if VMCI is enabled, a guest can execute arbitrary code in the context of the vmx process on the host. This is a compiler-dependent vulnerability. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the CVE number CVE-2008-2099 to this issue. (bug 234208)
* A security vulnerability related to the host-guest file system (HGFS) could cause a buffer overflow. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the CVE number CVE-2008-2098 to this issue. (bug 234214)

# On Windows hosts, if you have configured and enabled a shared folder, it is possible for an attacker to write arbitrary content from a guest system to arbitrary locations on the host system (CORE-2007-0930). (bug 200360)
# This release updates the libpng library to version 1.2.22 to remove various security vulnerabilities. (bug 224453)

# Hosts with AMD Duron processors might not be able to power on virtual machines. This problem resulted because Duron processors that are based on Athlon do not have Intel SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). (bug 183866)

# Ubuntu 7.04 virtual machines sometimes power off unexpectedly if paravirtual kernel support is enabled. (bug 190499)

# This release fixes several security vulnerabilities in the VMware DHCP server that could enable a malicious web page to gain system-level privileges.
Thanks to Neel Mehta and Ryan Smith of the IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force for discovering and researching these vulnerabilities.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the following names to these issues: CVE-2007-0061, CVE-2007-0062, CVE-2007-0063.
# This release fixes a security vulnerability that could allow a guest operating system user with administrative privileges to cause memory corruption in a host process, and thus potentially execute arbitrary code on the host. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the following name to this issue: CVE-2007-4496.
Thanks to Rafal Wojtczvk of McAfee for identifying and reporting this issue.
# This release fixes a security vulnerability that could allow a guest operating system user without administrator privileges to cause a host process to become unresponsive or exit unexpectedly, making the guest operating system unusable. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the following name to this issue: CVE-2007-4497.
Thanks to Rafal Wojtczvk of McAfee for identifying and reporting this issue.
# This release fixes a security vulnerability that could allow a malicious remote user to exploit the library file IntraProcessLogging.dll to overwrite files in a system.
Thanks to the Goodfellas Security Research Team for discovering and researching these vulnerabilities.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the following name to this issue: CVE-2007-4059.
# This release fixes a security vulnerability that could allow a malicious remote user to exploit the library file vielib.dll to overwrite files in a system.
Thanks to the Goodfellas Security Research Team for discovering and researching these vulnerabilities.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the following names to this issue: CVE-2007-4155.
# This release fixes a problem that prevented VMware Player from launching. This problem was accompanied by the error message VMware Player unrecoverable error: (player) Exception 0xc0000005 (access violation) has occurred. This problem could result in a security vulnerability from images stored in virtual machines downloaded by the user.
# This release fixes a security vulnerability in which VMware Player was starting registered Windows services such as the Authorization service with "bare" (unquoted) paths, such as c:program filesvmware.... Applications and services in Windows must be started with a quoted path. This vulnerability could allow a malicious user to escalate user privileges.
Thanks to Foundstone for discovering this vulnerability.

VMware Player 2.0 adds the following features:

* Windows Vista support - You can use Windows Vista as a host and guest operating system.
* USB 2.0 Support - You can use peripherals that require high-speed performance, such as MP3 players and fast storage devices, in your virtual machines.
* Shared folders - If the virtual machine has shared folders enabled, you can use this feature to move files between the host and guest operating systems. The virtual machine must be preconfigured with shared folders enabled, and with the path specified to the designated shared folder on the host. As a security precaution, shared folders are disabled by default in VMware Player. When you open a virtual machine with shared folders in VMware Player, a notification message explains that shared folders have been disabled, and tells you how to re-enable the feature.
* Appliance view - Virtual machine appliances can now be preconfigured to display an appliance view. A virtual appliance is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment that runs on any standard x86 desktop or server in a virtual machine - for example, a Web server application with a browser-based console. The appliance view gives you a brief description of the type of server or appliance and provides a link that opens the browser on the guest system and connects to the correct port for the server console. If a virtual machine is configured with an appliance view, VMware Player defaults to the appliance view. You can also use the traditional console view if you prefer.
* Welcome page - The user-friendly Welcome page gives you the option of browsing to a virtual machine file, opening a recently used virtual machine, or downloading a virtual appliance from the VMTN (VMware Technology Network) Web site.
* Experimental support for Virtual SMP - You can use VMware Player to power on a virtual machine that has more than one virtual processor assigned.

VMware Player 1.0.4 addresses the following security issues:

* Virtual machines can be put in various states of suspension, as specified by the ACPI power management standard. When returning from a sleep state (S2) to the run state (S0), the virtual machine process (VMX) collects information about the last recorded running state for the virtual machine. Under some circumstances, VMX read state information from an incorrect memory location. This issue could be used to complete a successful Denial-of-Service attack where the virtual machine would need to be rebooted.
Thanks to Tavis Ormandy of Google for identifying this issue.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE- 2007-1337 to this issue.
* Some VMware products support storing configuration information in VMware system files. Under some circumstances, a malicious user could instruct the virtual machine process (VMX) to store malformed data, causing an error. This error could enable a successful Denial-of-Service attack on guest operating systems.
Thanks to Sungard Ixsecurity for identifying this issue.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE-2007-1877 to this issue.
* Some VMware products managed memory in a way that failed to gracefully handle some general protection faults (GPFs) in Windows guest operating systems. A malicious user could use this vulnerability to crash Windows virtual machines. While this vulnerability could allow an attacker to crash a virtual machine, we do not believe it was possible to escalate privileges or escape virtual containment.
Thanks to Ruben Santamarta of Reversemode for identifying this issue.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE-2007-1069 to this issue.
* In a 64-bit Windows guest on a 64-bit host, debugging local programs could create system instability. Using a debugger to step into a syscall instruction may corrupt the virtual machine's register context. This corruption produces unpredictable results including corrupted stack pointers, kernel bugchecks, or vmware-vmx process failures. (bug 152159)
Thanks to Ken Johnson for identifying this issue.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE-2007-1876 to this issue.

In addition, VMware Player 1.0.4 fixes the following problem:

* A problem with VMware Tools caused the guest to run out of memory.