Critical vulnerabilities in NVIDIA's Linux GPU drivers pose urgent security challenges for cloud GPU users, enabling privilege escalation and host memory overwriting. It's essential for system administrators to upgrade their drivers to safeguard cloud shared instances.
NvRoot and ForgePtr bugs allow host memory corruption and arbitrary writes
The NVIDIA GPU drivers are affected by two critical vulnerabilities, namely NvRoot (CVE-2026-47591) and ForgePtr (CVE-2026-47501), each rated at CVSS 7.8. NvRoot arises from an error in GPU memory permission checking that allows users to corrupt crucial host files such as the su binary cache. Meanwhile, ForgePtr is due to a lack of error checking when validating event buffer handles, which permits arbitrary address write operations.
For patching these vulnerabilities, NVIDIA has made available the following specific driver versions. The NvRoot vulnerability is addressed in driver version 610.57.04. The ForgePtr vulnerability is patched in driver version 615.71.09. Please check your current driver versions and promptly apply the necessary patches.
According to security researcher Stealthium, these known vulnerabilities are just the tip of the iceberg. They claim to have uncovered 25 more high- or critical-level vulnerabilities in the NVIDIA AI runtime stack awaiting disclosure. The existence of the upcoming vulnerabilities in NVIDIA AI runtime stack highlights the importance of conducting a thorough security assessment of the software stack to ensure the long-term stability of your system.
I am running driver 610.40 on my server. Does the 610.57.04 patch for NvRoot require a full reboot or just a driver reload to clear the privilege escalation risk?
You need a full reboot. The vulnerability involves host memory corruption that the kernel cannot safely patch while the driver is active in memory. Waiting for the 615.71.09 fix for ForgePtr is also wise.