AMD Pensando ionic cloud driver for VMware ESXi (heap overflow): Heap-based buffer overflow in the ionic SmartNIC

Impact

Heap-based buffer overflow in the ionic SmartNIC driver on ESXi allowing privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution. The DPU driver sits in the hypervisor's network datapath, so compromise reaches all tenant traffic on the host.

Who can reach it

Local low-privilege access on the ESXi host; high attack complexity.

What to do

Apply the AMD-provided driver update per AMD-SB-2001. Driver VIB update plus host reboot - coordinate with any DPU firmware update in the same bulletin so you take one outage rather than two.

References