NVIDIA GPU Display Driver - Linux kernel module (nvidia.ko): An unprivileged local user gets limited write access

Impact

An unprivileged local user gets limited write access to memory the driver treats as protected, which is enough to crash the node. Everything with a GPU allocation on the node can reach this, because /dev/nvidia* is handed straight into every GPU container by the container toolkit - there is no additional gate between a tenant workload and the driver ioctl surface.

Who can reach it

Local and unprivileged. The attacker needs only to open /dev/nvidiactl and /dev/nvidia<N> and issue ioctls. On a shared node that is any scheduled tenant pod holding a GPU; no host shell, no root, no CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

What to do

Move to the fixed datacenter driver branch named in NVIDIA bulletin 5312. Cost: nvidia.ko cannot be replaced while a process holds a GPU, so this is cordon + drain + module reload per node - stop persistence mode and nv-hostengine/DCGM first or the unload fails. With the GPU Operator it is a rolling node upgrade. No VBIOS, BMC or SBIOS flash needed.

References