Introduction
Privilege boundaries between guest and host in virtualized GPU environments are critical for cloud providers, research institutions, and enterprises running sensitive workloads. A single flaw in the software managing GPU resources can allow a malicious guest to compromise the host, disrupt services, or access confidential data from neighboring tenants. This is precisely the risk posed by CVE-2025-23352, a high-severity vulnerability in NVIDIA's Virtual GPU (vGPU) software.
NVIDIA is the dominant vendor in GPU hardware and virtualization software, with its vGPU stack deployed in data centers, cloud platforms, and professional visualization environments worldwide. The Virtual GPU Manager enables multiple virtual machines to share a single physical GPU, making it foundational for GPU-accelerated virtualization at scale. Any vulnerability in this component has broad implications for security and reliability across industries.
Technical Information
CVE-2025-23352 is a memory safety vulnerability categorized under CWE-824 (Access of Uninitialized Pointer). The issue resides in the Virtual GPU Manager component of NVIDIA vGPU software. A guest virtual machine with access to a vGPU can send specially crafted GPU commands that trigger a code path where a pointer variable is accessed before being initialized. Because the Virtual GPU Manager runs with elevated privileges on the hypervisor host, this uninitialized pointer access can lead to several outcomes:
- Arbitrary code execution in the context of the host
- Denial of service by crashing the Virtual GPU Manager or corrupting memory
- Escalation of privileges from guest to host
- Information disclosure from unintended memory reads
- Data tampering by corrupting host memory structures
The attack vector is local. The attacker must have code execution inside a guest VM assigned a vGPU, but only low privileges are needed. No user interaction is required. The vulnerability is triggered by sending crafted GPU API calls from the guest to the Virtual GPU Manager. The exact code path and pointer variable involved have not been disclosed publicly, and no code snippets or proof-of-concept details are available in public sources.
Affected Systems and Versions
CVE-2025-23352 affects NVIDIA vGPU software across several major release branches. The following versions are vulnerable:
- vGPU Software 19 on R580 driver branch: all versions prior to 19.2 (Linux Virtual GPU Manager 580.95.02, Windows Virtual GPU Manager 581.42)
- vGPU Software 18 on R570 driver branch: all versions prior to 18.5 (Linux Virtual GPU Manager 570.195.02, Windows Virtual GPU Manager 573.79)
- vGPU Software 16 on R535 driver branch: all versions prior to 16.12 (Linux Virtual GPU Manager 535.274.03, Windows Virtual GPU Manager 539.56)
All supported hypervisor platforms are affected, including VMware vSphere, Citrix Hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM, Ubuntu with KVM, and Nutanix AHV. The vulnerability is present in both Linux and Windows versions of the Virtual GPU Manager. Any configuration where a guest VM is assigned a vGPU and is able to send GPU commands to the Virtual GPU Manager is at risk.
Vendor Security History
NVIDIA has a history of security issues in its GPU driver and vGPU software stack. Previous vulnerabilities have included buffer overflows, race conditions, and other memory safety flaws in privileged GPU management components. The company operates a dedicated Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) and generally coordinates patch releases across multiple branches. NVIDIA has recently improved transparency by publishing security bulletins on GitHub in machine-readable formats, aiding integration with automated patch management systems.