CVE-2026-47516

A flaw was found in the NVIDIA GPU Display Driver. An unprivileged local user can trigger a use-after-free condition, which occurs when the driver accesses memory that has already been released. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code, escalate privileges, tamper with data, or cause a denial of service.

Red Hat rates this vulnerability as Important because an authenticated local user can achieve arbitrary code execution with kernel-level privileges, completely compromising host confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The flaw specifically affects systems with compatible NVIDIA hardware where the proprietary display driver stack is installed and actively in use. Default configurations without these external driver packages or environments that do not load the driver remain unaffected.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

To mitigate this vulnerability on systems where NVIDIA GPU acceleration or compute capabilities are not required, prevent the driver modules from loading:

1. Create a modprobe configuration file to blacklist the driver:

echo "blacklist nvidia" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia.conf

echo "install nvidia /bin/false" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia.conf

2. If the module is included in the initramfs, regenerate the image:

dracut -f

Caveats: Blacklisting this module will disable NVIDIA GPU hardware acceleration, graphical desktop rendering on the GPU, and compute frameworks (such as CUDA). If the driver is currently loaded into the running kernel, a system reboot is required for these changes to take effect.