NVIDIA Drivers: Privilege escalation

Background

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

Description

Two vulnerabilities have been discovered in NVIDIA drivers:

• 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 (CVE-2012-4225).
• A buffer overflow error has been discovered in NVIDIA drivers (CVE-2013-0131).

NOTE: Exposure to CVE-2012-4225 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-304.88"