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CISA KEV · ACTIVELY EXPLOITED
CRITICAL severity

CVE-2025-22224 — Cloud Foundation

CRITICAL

CVE-2025-22224 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.3) CWE-367 vulnerability in vmware cloud foundation. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-03-04) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.

VMware ESXi, and Workstation contain a TOCTOU (Time-of-Check Time-of-Use) vulnerability that leads to an out-of-bounds write. A malicious actor with local administrative privileges…

Published
Updated
Affected
5 products
Patched
See advisory
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Oct 23, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, CISA KEV, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

Actively exploited in the wild

  • Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-03-04. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-03-25.
  • A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.

Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2025-22224.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
1.6%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs75th percentile — riskier than 75% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%22.7%45.3%68.0%52.7%1.6%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

CVE-2025-22224 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Description

VMware ESXi, and Workstation contain a TOCTOU (Time-of-Check Time-of-Use) vulnerability that leads to an out-of-bounds write. A malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine may exploit this issue to execute code as the virtual machine's VMX process running on the host.

Affected Products

5 products · 56 configurations
Application
cloud foundationvmware
all
OS
esxivmware
2 versions
7.08.0
Application
telco cloud infrastructurevmware
4 versions
2.22.52.73.0
Application
telco cloud platformvmware
7 versions
2.02.52.73.04.04.0.15.0
Application
workstationvmware
≥ 17.0 && < 17.6.3
range

Detection & mitigation playbook

Vendor / appliance

  1. Detect

    Inventory every vmware cloud foundation deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.

  2. Fix

    Apply the vmware cloud foundation security patch or hotfix for CVE-2025-22224 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.

  3. Workarounds

    Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.

Frequently Asked Questions

VMware ESXi, and Workstation contain a TOCTOU (Time-of-Check Time-of-Use) vulnerability that leads to an out-of-bounds write. A malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine may exploit this issue to execute code as the virtual machine's VMX process running on the host.
O3 Security · Runtime Protection

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CVE-2025-22224: Cloud Foundation (Critical 9.3, KEV)