Yesterday Iain Mulholland, Director of VMware Security Response Center, posted a VMware Security Note on Power of Partnership and VMware Security & Compliance official blogs.
Mulholland announced the public posting, on April 23, of a single file, containing VMware ESX source code and commentary from the period between 2003 and 2004.
The company has not officially reported which products could be compromised from this code leak or who might be the origin of the publication.
Due to ESX complexity what is clear is that the level of risk is directly related to what kind of information are contained in the published code.
If the code leaked was more service console level, versus the hypervisor or virtual machine manager (VMM) level code, then this is probably no big deal. However, if the code contains some of the more proprietary stuff, then it is a potential security risk — as well as a competitive risk if someone like Oracle, Red Hat, or Microsoft can capitalize on it.
Said Chris Ward, vice president of consulting and Integration at Greenpages, as crn.com reports.
Yesterday, April 23, 2012, our security team became aware of the public posting of a single file from the VMware ESX source code and the possibility that more files may be posted in the future. The posted code and associated commentary dates to the 2003 to 2004 timeframe.
The fact that the source code may have been publicly shared does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers. VMware proactively shares its source code and interfaces with other industry participants to enable the broad virtualization ecosystem today. We take customer security seriously and have engaged internal and external resources, including our VMware Security Response Center, to thoroughly investigate. We will continue to provide updates to the VMware community if and when additional information is available.