NVIDIA GPU Display Driver (Windows nvlddmkm.sys + Linux nvidia.ko): User-mode clients can reach legacy privileged APIs

CVSS 7.8CVE-2021-1052NVIDIA / GPU stackcurated

Impact

User-mode clients can reach legacy privileged APIs in the kernel-mode layer through DxgkDdiEscape or ioctl. This is a whole class of privileged driver functionality left exposed to unprivileged callers - NVIDIA rates it escalation and disclosure capable on both Windows and Linux. On a Linux GPU node, any container with /dev/nvidiactl can reach it.

Who can reach it

Any local user or GPU container on the host. Container isolation does not help: the device node is the attack surface and the standard container toolkit maps it in.

What to do

Install the fixed GPU Display Driver branch on both Windows and Linux nodes. The kernel component (nvlddmkm.sys / nvidia.ko) cannot be hot-swapped under load, so this is a node drain and reboot per host; restart the container runtime afterwards so mounted driver libraries match the kernel module. No VBIOS or BMC flash.

References

https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202310-02 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-1052

Related entries

All NVIDIA / GPU stack entries

This entry is curated: imported from vendor advisories with machine assistance, not yet individually verified. Confirm against your vendor's advisory before acting, and report anything wrong.