CVE-2026-47517

A flaw was found in nvidia-driver. A local user can submit a specially crafted input/output control (ioctl) request to the kernel-mode driver, triggering a null pointer dereference. Successful exploitation can crash the system, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS).

This vulnerability is rated as Moderate severity because exploitation requires an attacker to already have authenticated local access to issue ioctl requests, and the resulting impact is confined to a denial of service via a kernel crash without compromising system confidentiality or integrity. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments, exposure is limited to hosts equipped with physical NVIDIA graphics hardware running the proprietary driver stack. Systems that do not utilize NVIDIA accelerators or that rely on standard in-tree display modules are not exposed.

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.

Prevent the NVIDIA kernel driver module from loading by blacklisting it in modprobe configuration:

1. Add the module to the blacklist configuration file:

echo "install nvidia /bin/true" >> /etc/modprobe.d/disable-nvidia.conf

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

2. If the module is currently loaded, unload it:

modprobe -r nvidia

Caveats: Blacklisting the driver disables NVIDIA GPU acceleration, display output, and compute workloads on the host.

Warning: A system reboot is required if the driver module cannot be unloaded immediately due to active processes or graphical sessions utilizing the device.