Nvidia Binary Exploit Gives Root Access on Linux

Nvidia is reported to have a dangerous exploit in its binary driver and it seems that is doing nothing to fix the situation or even acknowledge it.

In a mailing list post, Dave Airlie, a well known X hacker, has reported that a bug in the Nvidia binary would grant a user root access. He says the information has been passed to him anonymously, but the source is to be trusted.

“It basically abuses the fact that the /dev/nvidia0 device accept changes to the VGA window and moves the window around until it can read/write to somewhere useful in physical RAM, then it just does an priv escalation by writing directly to kernel memory.” - said Dave Airlie.

Nvidia has some problems with its drivers before, and even recently, Linus Thorvalds gave them the finger, literally. This is not good news for the video card manufacturer. The only way out of this is to provide a fix as quickly as possible.