How to Patch the 5 New Vulnerabilities in VMware Workspace ONE Assist

VMWare published an advisory on 8th Nov 2022 in which it disclosed 5 new vulnerabilities in VMWare Workspace ONE Assist. Out of the five vulnerabilities, three are rated Critical, and two are rated Moderate in severity. All five vulnerabilities are assigned CVSS scores from 9.8 to 4.2. Attackers could abuse these vulnerabilities to carry out authentication bypass, remote code execution, privilege escalation, URL injection, path traversal, and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks on vulnerable versions of VMWare Workspace ONE Assis. It is highly recommended that organizations who use the VMWare Workspace ONE Assis should patch the 5 new vulnerabilities in VMWare Workspace ONE Assist

A Short Note About VMWare Workspace ONE Assist:

VMWare Workspace ONE Assist is a cloud-based, enterprise-level remote support solution that helps businesses provide rapid, efficient, and effective support to their employees. This is a desktop application that Enables IT and helps desk staff to remotely support employees with device tasks and issues directly from the Workspace ONE console.

The solution offers a number of features and benefits that can help businesses improve their support operations, including:

Overall, Workspace ONE Assist is an incredibly powerful tool that can save your IT team a lot of time and headaches when it comes to providing support for their employees. If you are not already using it, we highly recommend that you check it out!

Summary of 5 New Vulnerabilities in VMware Workspace ONE Assist:

As per the advisory released by VMware, there are five vulnerabilities identified in the VMWare Workspace ONE Assist solution. Out of five, three are marked as critical in severity with a CVSS score of 9.8 on the scale and the remaining two flaws are marked as medium with the CVSS score of 6.4 & 4.2 out of 10.

CVE-2022-31685

This is an authentication bypass vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Assist. Upon the successful exploitation of this flaw, it allows attackers to access VMware Workspace ONE Assist with administrative privileges prior to authentication. However, the attacker should have access to the network to exploit this vulnerability.

CVE-2022-31686 & CVE-2022-31687

This is a Broken Authentication Method vulnerability in VMWare Workspace ONE Assist. Upon the successful exploitation of this flaw, it allows attackers to access VMware Workspace ONE Assist with administrative privileges prior to authentication. However, the attacker should have access to the network to exploit this vulnerability.

CVE-2022-31688

This is a Reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in VMWare Workspace ONE Assist. The flaw is due to improper user input sanitization. Successful exploitation would allow attackers to inject arbitrary JavaScript code into the target user’s window.

CVE-2022-31689

This is a Session fixation vulnerability in VMWare Workspace ONE Assist. The flaw is due to improper handling of session tokens. Successful exploitation would allow an attacker to obtain a valid session token later used to authenticate the application.

VMware Workspace ONE Assist Versions Affected

According to Jasper Westerman, Jan van der Put, Yanick de Pater, and Harm Blankers, a team of security researchers from REQON, a Netherlands-based security firm, all the versions of VMware Workspace ONE Assis are affected by these five vulnerabilities.

How to Patch the 5 New Vulnerabilities in VMware Workspace ONE Assist?

VMWare has released patched version 22.10 to address these vulnerabilities. We recommend upgrading all the 21.x and 22.x versions to install or upgrade v22.10 to patch the vulnerabilities. Please download the VMware Workspace ONE Assist v22.10 for your operating system from here:

How to Upgrade VMware Workspace ONE Assist?

You can upgrade in two different ways. One way is to do a fresh installation of the new version. The second way is to go for on-top installation. On-top installation is a straightforward and convenient way to upgrade VMware Workspace ONE Assist. In this method, you just need to run the new installer file on the existing installation keeping all certificates and the install.config file same. Let’s see the upgrade process in step by step procedure. We have covered the procedure for the Windows platform in this demo. However, the procedure remains the same for other platforms with their native operation procedures. 

We hope this post will help you patch the 5 new vulnerabilities in VMWare Workspace ONE Assist. Please share this post and help to secure the digital world. Visit our social media page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Telegram, Tumblr, Medium & Instagram, and subscribe to receive updates like this.