NVIDIA GPU Display Driver, GPU firmware: An attacker-triggerable assert in GPU firmware aborts harder than it needs

Impact

An attacker-triggerable assert in GPU firmware aborts harder than it needs to, crashing the system. Firmware-level asserts are worth noting because the failure is below the driver: the recovery is a node reset, not a service restart. Debian and Gentoo shipped it as a security update.

Who can reach it

Any local user or GPU container able to drive the firmware into the asserting path.

What to do

Install the fixed GPU Display Driver branch on both Windows and Linux nodes. The kernel component (nvlddmkm.sys / nvidia.ko) cannot be hot-swapped under load, so this is a node drain and reboot per host; restart the container runtime afterwards so mounted driver libraries match the kernel module. No VBIOS or BMC flash.

References