Description

NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller for Linux contains a vulnerability where an attacker could cause use of hard-coded credentials. A successful exploit of this vulnerability might lead to escalation of privileges, data tampering, denial of service, and information disclosure.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "9.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-22T15:17:11.513Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-22T15:17:11.513Z",
  "executiveSummary": "The NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller for Linux is susceptible to a vulnerability involving the utilization of hard-coded credentials within the application.\nThis flaw allows unauthorized entities to gain access to system resources that should be protected by authentication mechanisms.\nThe impact of this vulnerability is critical, encompassing potential privilege escalation, unauthorized data modification, information disclosure, and service degradation.\nBy leveraging these embedded credentials, an attacker can bypass standard security controls, effectively assuming the identity of a privileged user or service.\nThe vulnerability poses a severe risk to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the managed infrastructure.\nExploitation does not require advanced technical capabilities once the static credentials have been identified, as the attacker essentially utilizes 'keys' that are inherently baked into the software package.\nSecurity teams must treat this as a high-priority risk, as it provides a direct vector for persistent access and administrative control over the affected NVIDIA infrastructure components.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability lies in the insecure practice of embedding static, hard-coded credentials within the source code or binary configuration files of the NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller for Linux.\nUnlike dynamic authentication schemes that rely on salted, hashed credentials stored in secure vaults or managed via identity providers, these credentials are immutable and shared across all instances of the affected software.\nFrom an exploitation perspective, an attacker can extract these credentials through static binary analysis, reverse engineering of configuration files, or by inspecting cleartext strings within the controller's runtime memory.\nOnce the credentials are retrieved, the attack flow involves the adversary presenting these valid, hard-coded tokens to the authentication module of the controller. Because the system is programmed to accept these specific credentials as legitimate, the authentication challenge is bypassed entirely without the need for traditional password cracking or brute-force methods.\nThe exploitation allows an attacker to interact with the controller's administrative interface or API endpoints with elevated privileges. This enables the execution of arbitrary management commands, which can be leveraged for data tampering (modifying controller logic or configurations) and information disclosure (retrieving sensitive system metadata or logs).\nFurthermore, the ability to issue arbitrary management commands facilitates a denial of service (DoS) state, where the attacker can disrupt the controller's communication with the underlying hardware, effectively rendering the infrastructure unresponsive or offline.\nThis vulnerability is particularly dangerous because the credentials remain valid for any deployment of the product using the vulnerable version, creating a broad attack surface across different enterprise environments. Because the credentials are 'baked in,' the controller remains inherently insecure from the moment of installation. Post-exploitation, an attacker can achieve lateral movement within the network by utilizing the controller as a pivot point to reach other infrastructure components that trust the controller's identity. The persistence of these credentials means that even if a session is terminated, the attacker can re-authenticate at will unless the underlying code is modified to remove the hard-coded values or the credentials are rotated via an authorized patch or configuration update."
}