NVIDIA Drivers: Privilege escalation — GLSA 201206-19

A vulnerability in NVIDIA drivers may allow a local attacker to gain escalated privileges.

Affected packages

x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers on all architectures
Affected versions < 295.40
Unaffected versions >= 295.40

Background

The NVIDIA drivers provide X11 and GLX support for NVIDIA graphic boards.

Description

A vulnerability has been found in the way NVIDIA drivers handle read/write access to GPU device nodes, allowing access to arbitrary system memory locations.

NOTE: Exposure to this vulnerability is reduced in Gentoo due to 660 permissions being used on the GPU device nodes by default.

Impact

A local attacker could gain escalated privileges.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All NVIDIA driver users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose
 ">=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-295.40"
 

References

Release date
June 23, 2012

Latest revision
June 23, 2012: 1

Severity
high

Exploitable
local

Bugzilla entries