NVIDIA Driver Security Exploit

While this security vulnerability has been known since 2004, Rapid7 had issued a report yesterday on the buffer overflow problem in NVIDIA's binary Linux display drivers -- the issue also likely lies in the FreeBSD and Solaris drivers. This issue allows attackers to run code as root either locally or remotely. A working proof of concept is also available from Rapid7. The solution presented in this report is to remove the closed-source NVIDIA module and use the 2D NV module. NVIDIA has, however, stated that this problem has been fixed with the 1.0-9XXX series drivers. Disabling RenderAccel will also resolve this problem on the vulnerable drivers. There is also news on this NVIDIA Linux driver issue at KernelTrap. A thread has been setup on the Phoronix Forums to discuss this problem.