VMware Workstation is a powerful virtual machine for developers and system administrators.
Tavis Ormandy of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team has discovered that VMware Workstation searches for gdk-pixbuf loadable modules in an untrusted, world-writable directory.
A local attacker could create a malicious shared object that would be loaded by VMware, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running VMware.
The system administrator may create the file /tmp/rrdharan to prevent malicious users from creating a directory at that location:
# touch /tmp/rrdharan
All VMware Workstation users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-emulation/vmware-workstation-3.2.1.2242-r4"