Hackintoshes hackable

VMware has found two flaws un its products, both of which impact users running Mac OS.

One means that Mac OS X guest VMs running VMware Tools can “allow a privileged local user on a system where System Integrity Protection (SIP) is enabled, to obtain kernel memory addresses to bypass the kASLR protection mechanism.”

The good news is that SIP is default enabled in recent versions of Mac OS. Those of you who have turned it off or run older editions of Apple's finest need to update to VMware Tools 10.1.0 at your convenience.

The second problem has the same outcome and impacts Fusion, VMware's desktop hypervisor for Mac OS. The fix is an upgrade to Fusion 8.5.

Mac OS is notoriously hard to virtualise, and creating a Mac OS VM that will run on non-Apple hardware requires all manner of tweaking. Such VMs are therefore known as “Hackintoshes”. ®