Nvidia warns of GeForce Experience vulnerability

Nvidia has released a security bulletin for its GeForce Experience software, warning of a security flaw that can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code, lock up the system, or escalate their privileges beyond the usual user account.

Launched in beta form back in January 2013, GeForce Experience began life as a way to quickly optimise the settings of games for a particular Nvidia graphics card. By 2015 the software had expanded to include screenshot and video sharing and co-operative multiplayer functionality; another two years on and the increasingly feature-rich software was capable of multi-track audio on game footage recordings.

Nvidia's latest "feature", though, is a very unwelcome one: a security flaw which can be exploited by an attacker to elevate privilege level, lock up the system, or run arbitrary code without user interaction.

'Nvidia GeForce Experience contains a vulnerability when ShadowPlay, NvContainer, or GameStream is enabled,' the company's security bulletin explains. 'When opening a file, the software does not check for hard links. This behaviour may lead to code execution, denial of service, or escalation of privileges.' It cannot, however, be exploited remotely: an attacker would have to already have some way of running initial code on the system, such as a browser exploit, in order to take advantage of the vulnerability.

The flaw exists in all version of GeForce Experience prior to 3.18, which has been released specifically to address the vulnerability. Unlike another security bulletin released by the company last month, which covered code execution and privilege escalation issues in its graphics drivers on both Windows and Linux operating systems, this vulnerability is exclusive to Windows.

Nvidia users can download GeForce Experience 3.18.0.94 from the official website to fix the vulnerability, or open their existing copy to have it download and apply the update automatically.