Nvidia warns of security vulnerabilities in drivers for Windows

During the past year, serious security flaws in processors have become a relatively common phenomenon, but in the world of graphics cards, this type of problem is not as common. Now, however, Nvidia is issuing warnings that security flaws have been discovered in the company’s graphics drivers, flaws that affect the Geforce, Quadro and Tesla product families.

In an update on the company’s customer service portal, Nvidia describes the five security flaws that have been discovered. By exploiting the vulnerabilities, it becomes possible to execute code locally on the system, perform Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and increase the access level (escalation of privileges) of processes in the host system. A glimmer of light in the dilemma is that the code must be executed locally, and can not be executed over remote connections.

Nvidia’s updated driver for the Geforce family is version 431.60, so all previous versions of the driver are vulnerable to security vulnerabilities. Users are therefore prompted to download version 431.60 from the driver portal immediately. For the Quadro family, the shortcomings in version 426.00 will be fixed, while the update for the Tesla family is expected to arrive during the week beginning on 12 August.

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