Vulnerability detected in NVIDIA display driver service

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 12/27/2012 08:37 AM | source: | 3 comment(s)

A hacker called Peter Winter-Smith discovered a security hole in NVIDIA's display driver service that allows local and remote users (Windows firewall/file sharing permitting) to gain administrator privileges in Windows via a stack buffer overflow.

Mr. Winter-Smith posted a description and details of the exploit, in which he describes the NVIDIA Display Device server (NVVSVC) as listening on a pipe (a means by which different processes talk to each other) "pipensvr," which has an null/empty discretionary access control list (DACL, a security whitelist for users/groups), letting ordinary logged in local and remote users (firewall permitting, and the remote admin has a local account) to gain administrator rights to the system.

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Veeshush
Senior Member

Posts: 1098
Joined: 2010-11-28

#4488896 Posted on: 12/28/2012 08:01 PM

Surprised no one is really saying much about this. A few replies over at the nvidia forum: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/526419/geforce-drivers/security-exploit-found-nvidia-drivers/

Threat Post: http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/nvidia-display-driver-service-attack-escalates-privileges-windows-machines-122712

I want to say from the little bit I've read the average user wouldn't have much to worry about as long as they have a firewall up.

lucidus
Senior Member

Posts: 11771
Joined: 2011-12-31

#4488901 Posted on: 12/28/2012 08:06 PM

From what I understand only Enterprises are vulnerable provided the firewall rules are relaxed. Meh.

Noisiv
Senior Member

Posts: 6586
Joined: 2010-11-16

#4488962 Posted on: 12/28/2012 09:38 PM

How about Pro with UAC, software and hardware firewall, and Secondary Logon Service disabled

What pisses me off is that multi-billion $ company does not have a single person dedicated for informing the public in a fast and accurate manner.
But if I was guessing, I'd say that NVIDIA is publicly ignoring this due to a manner that the exploit has been disclosed.

Winter-Smith said he wanted to share the exploit in a timely fashion, rather than report it.

“I am definitely not averse to responsible disclosure and typically do follow a responsible disclosure process, however the risk from this particular flaw being exploited was (is) sufficiently low that I didn't think it would warrant the wait,” he said.

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