Security vulnerability for OpenSSL: CVE-2025-9230

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• There is generally available and publicly disclosed information about the highly rated vulnerability CVE-2025-9230
• An application trying to decrypt CMS messages encrypted using password based encryption can trigger an out-of-bounds read and write. Impact summary: This out-of-bounds read may trigger a crash which leads to Denial of Service for an application. The out-of-bounds write can cause a memory corruption which can have various consequences including a Denial of Service or Execution of attacker-supplied code. Although the consequences of a successful exploit of this vulnerability could be severe, the probability that the attacker would be able to perform it is low. Besides, password based (PWRI) encryption support in CMS messages is very rarely used. For that reason the issue was assessed as Moderate severity according to our Security Policy

Environment

VMware ESXi host 8.0.3

Resolution

• ESXi host 8.0 U3 build 24784735 is using OpenSSL 3.0 FIPS provider. VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 3 Release Notes
• The FIPS modules in 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.2, 3.1 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue, as the CMS implementation is outside the OpenSSL FIPS module boundary. Read more at CVE-2025-9230 Detail