VMware released critical updates to several products Thursday, primarily to fix several security vulnerabilities.

The virtualization software provider issued the updates to deal with vulnerabilities that could enable an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files, gain elevated privileges, cause a denial-of-service condition, or execute arbitrary code on an affected system, according to an advisory from the U.S.-CERT.

Affected products include VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, VMware ACE, and VMware Player, the security organization noted. U.S.-CERT is recommending that users upgrade to mitigate the security risk.

A VMware advisory noted that updated versions of all supported hosted products and all ESX 2x products and patches for ESX 30x address critical security updates were available for download.

The company also noted that one fix deals with a security vulnerability that could allow a guest operating system user with administrative privileges to cause memory corruption in a host process, and potentially execute arbitrary code on the host. Another fix addresses a denial-of-service vulnerability that could allow a guest operating system to cause a host process to become unresponsive or crash. VMware gave credit to Rafal Wojtczvk, a McAfee researcher, for identifying and reporting the bugs.

Another update addresses several vulnerabilities in the DHCP server that could enable specially crafted packets to gain system-level privileges. The DHCP server listens for client requests and processes them. VMware gave credit to Neel Mehta and Ryan Smith from IBM's Internet Security Systems X-Force for discovering and researching the flaw.

An additional update, according to the advisory, addresses a security vulnerability that could allow a remote hacker to exploit the library file IntraProcessLogging.dll to overwrite files in a system. It also fixes a similar bug in the library file vielib.dll. The company credits the Goodfellas Security Research Team for discovering and researching the flaws.