Windows: Most gamers love updating their graphics card’s drivers to score the best performance for their favorite titles. But even if you’re a “filthy casual,” you’re going to want to make sure your system’s Nvidia drivers are up to date. Nvidia recently found a few critical vulnerabilities in its display driver that need fixing, pronto.
As Nvidia noted in a Friday security bulletin, five different issues impact Windows users running GPUs from the company’s GeForce, Quadro, NVS, or Tesla lines. (For most people, that’s just GeForce—everything else is for professional workstations or commercial implementations.)
We’ve listed the specific vulnerabilities below. Even if you don’t understand all of the tech-speak, it’s worth knowing that Nvidia’s ranks them between a 5.2 and an 8.8 on its “how severe is this vulnerability” assessment scale—a scale that goes to 10. All of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to either execute code or a denial-of-service attack, and all are incredibly easy to patch with one simple update.
- CVE?2019?5683: “NVIDIA Windows GPU Display Driver contains a vulnerability in the user mode video driver trace logger component. When an attacker has access to the system and creates a hard link, the software does not check for hard link attacks. This behavior may lead to code execution, denial of service, or escalation of privileges.”
- CVE?2019?5684: “NVIDIA Windows GPU Display Driver contains a vulnerability in DirectX drivers, in which a specially crafted shader can cause an out of bounds access of an input texture array, which may lead to denial of service or code execution.”
- CVE?2019?5685: “NVIDIA Windows GPU Display Driver contains a vulnerability in DirectX drivers, in which a specially crafted shader can cause an out of bounds access to a shader local temporary array, which may lead to denial of service or code execution.”
- CVE?2019?5686: “NVIDIA Windows GPU Display Driver contains a vulnerability in the kernel mode layer (nvlddmkm.sys) handler for DxgkDdiEscape in which the software uses an API function or data structure in a way that relies on properties that are not always guaranteed to be valid, which may lead to denial of service.”
- CVE?2019?5687: “NVIDIA Windows GPU Display Driver contains a vulnerability in the kernel mode layer (nvlddmkm.sys) handler for DxgkDdiEscape in which an incorrect use of default permissions for an object exposes it to an unintended actor, which may lead to information disclosure or denial of service.”
