NVIDIA GPU Display Driver for Windows, nvidia-smi: nvidia-smi loads DLLs from an uncontrolled path

Impact

nvidia-smi loads DLLs from an uncontrolled path. nvidia-smi is run by monitoring agents, schedulers and health checks, usually as a privileged service and often on a timer - so an unprivileged user who can plant a DLL gets scheduled code execution as that service on every GPU node running the same monitoring stack.

Who can reach it

Any local user who can write to a directory on nvidia-smi's DLL search path on a Windows GPU host.

What to do

Install the fixed Windows GPU Display Driver branch listed in the NVIDIA bulletin. nvlddmkm.sys is a kernel driver: the swap needs a host reboot, so on a Windows GPU node this is a drain-and-reboot, not a live driver reload. No VBIOS or BMC flash involved.

References