Category Archives: AI and ML

CVE-2025-2953: Floating point exception in torch[.]mkldnn_max_pool2d (31st Mar 2025)

Preface: The torch[.]nn[.]MaxPool2d function in PyTorch is used to apply a 2D max pooling operation over an input signal, which is typically an image or a batch of images.

  • Torch[.]mkldnn_max_pool2d is optimized for Intel’s MKL-DNN (Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks). It leverages specific optimizations for Intel CPUs, which can lead to better performance on those processors. It might have limitations in terms of supported features and is more specialized for performance optimization.
  • Torch[.]nn[.]MaxPool2d is a more general implementation that works across different hardware platforms without specific optimizations for Intel CPUs.  It provides more flexibility and is easier to use within the PyTorch ecosystem, supporting various features like padding, dilation, and return indices.

Background: A floating point exception crash when using torch[.]mkldnn_max_pool2d can occur due to several reasons, often related to invalid or extreme values for parameters like kernel size, stride, or padding. Here are some common causes:

  1. Invalid Kernel Size: If the kernel size is set to an extremely large value or zero, it can lead to division by zero or other invalid operations, causing a floating point exception.
  2. Stride and Padding Issues: Similar to kernel size, setting stride or padding to extreme values can result in invalid calculations. For example, a stride of zero can cause the pooling operation to repeatedly access the same elements, leading to a crash.
  3. Input Tensor Dimensions: If the dimensions of the input tensor are not compatible with the specified kernel size, stride, or padding, it can lead to invalid memory access or calculations.

Vulnerability details: A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, has been found in PyTorch 2.6.0+cu124. Affected by this issue is the function torch[.]mkldnn_max_pool2d. The manipulation leads to denial of service. An attack has to be approached locally. The exploit has been disclosed to the public and may be used.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details – https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-2953

Similar to previously disclosed side-channel attacks. Manufacturer (AMD) response to researcher (30-03-2025)

Preface: On 24th Oct, 2024, Researchers from Azure® Research, Microsoft® have provided to AMD a paper titled “Principled Microarchitectural Isolation on Cloud CPUs.” In their paper, the researchers describe a potential side-channel vulnerability on AMD CPUs. AMD believes that existing mitigation recommendations for prime and probe side-channel attacks remain applicable to the presented vulnerability.

Background: A two-bit saturating up-down counter is a type of counter used in computer architecture, particularly in branch prediction mechanisms. Here’s a brief overview:

  • Two-bit: The counter uses two bits, allowing it to represent four states (00, 01, 10, 11).
  • Up-down: The counter can increment (count up) or decrement (count down) based on the input signal.
  • Saturating: The counter does not wrap around when it reaches its maximum (11) or minimum (00) value. Instead, it stays at these values if further increments or decrements are attempted.
How It Works:
  1. States: The counter has four states: 00, 01, 10, and 11.
  2. Incrementing: If the counter is at 11 and receives an increment signal, it remains at 11. Similarly, if it is at 00 and receives a decrement signal, it stays at 00.
  3. Usage: These counters are often used in branch prediction to keep track of the history of branch outcomes and make predictions based on this history.

Ref: The pattern history table (PHT) branch architecture is an example of an architecture using two-bit saturating up-down counters. It contains a table of two-bit counters used to predict the direction for conditional branches.

About Branch History Leak:

Researchers from The Harbin Institute of Technology have shared with AMD a paper titled “Branch History LeakeR: Leveraging Branch History to Construct a New Side Channel-Theory and Practice” that demonstrates a side channel attack using the Global History Register (GHR).  The GHR is used to assist in conditional branch prediction. The researchers note that the GHR is shared between different security domains and may retain data after a security domain switch.  After a return to the user-space, the researchers were able to infer the direction of recently executed conditional branches.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details – https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-7026.html

CVE-2025-30219: About RabbitMQ (26th Mar 2025)

Preface: Message queues are quite important in machine learning for several reasons:

  1. Decoupling Components: They allow different parts of a machine learning system to operate independently. For example, data producers (like sensors or user inputs) can send data to a queue, and data consumers (like preprocessing units or models) can process this data at their own pace.
  2. Asynchronous Processing: Machine learning tasks, especially training and inference, can be resource-intensive and time-consuming. Message queues enable these tasks to be processed asynchronously, ensuring that the system remains responsive and efficient.
  3. Scalability: By using message queues, you can easily scale your machine learning system. Multiple consumers can process messages from the queue simultaneously, allowing the system to handle larger workloads without bottlenecks.

Background: RabbitMQ can be quite helpful in AI applications! RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker that facilitates communication between different parts of a system asynchronously. Here are some ways it can assist AI:

  1. Task Orchestration: RabbitMQ can manage and distribute tasks across various AI models and services, ensuring efficient processing and load balancing.
  2. Handling Asynchronous Requests: It can queue up inference requests and process them asynchronously, which is particularly useful for resource-intensive AI models.
  3. Data Queuing: RabbitMQ can queue data for processing, allowing AI systems to handle large volumes of data in a controlled manner.

If you enable the management Plugin, you will be able to use not only the webUI but also the HTTP API. In fact, the WebUI is a wrapper around the HTTP API.

Vulnerability details: RabbitMQ is a messaging and streaming broker. Versions prior to 4.0.3 are vulnerable to a sophisticated attack that could modify virtual host name on disk and then make it unrecoverable (with other on disk file modifications) can lead to arbitrary JavaScript code execution in the browsers of management UI users.

When a virtual host on a RabbitMQ node fails to start, recent versions will display an error message (a notification) in the management UI. The error message includes virtual host name, which was not escaped prior to open source RabbitMQ 4.0.3 and Tanzu RabbitMQ 4.0.3, 3.13.8.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details –

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-30219

CVE-2025-21424: Memory corruption while calling the NPU driver APIs concurrently (16th Mar 2025)

NVD Published Date: 03/03/2025
NVD Last Modified: 03/07/2025

Preface: Real-time processing of sensor data for tasks like obstacle detection and navigation is crucial, making NPUs ideal for these applications. NPUs help in real-time decision-making and control, which is essential for robotic applications. While NPUs are highly efficient for specific AI applications, they cannot replace GPUs due to their limited scope.

Background: Mutex Unlocking: The mutex is unlocked after the resource has been freed.

If another thread tries to access the resource after it has been freed but before the mutex is unlocked, it can lead to a use-after-free vulnerability. This is because the memory location might be reused for another purpose, leading to undefined behavior when the freed resource is accessed.

Vulnerability details: Memory corruption while calling the NPU driver APIs concurrently.

Reference:

mutex_unlock: This function releases a mutex that was previously locked. Mutexes are used to ensure that only one thread can access a particular section of code or data at a time, preventing race conditions.

&npu_dev->dev_lock: This is the address of the mutex lock associated with the npu_dev device. The dev_lock is a member of the npu_dev structure, and the & operator gets its address.

When this command is executed, it releases the lock on dev_lock, allowing other threads that might be waiting to acquire the lock to proceed

Official announcement: Please see the link for details –

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-21424

CVE-2025-23242 & CVE-2025-23243:NVIDIA Riva contains a vulnerability where a user could cause an improper access control issue (13th Mar 2025)

Preface: NeMo is an open source PyTorch-based toolkit for research in conversational AI that exposes more of the model and PyTorch internals. Riva supports the ability to import supported models trained in NeMo.

NVIDIA Riva is a GPU-accelerated SDK for building Speech AI applications, customized for your use case, and delivering real-time performance.

Background: NVIDIA Riva does not come with any default user accounts. Instead, it relies on secure access through NVIDIA NGC (NVIDIA GPU Cloud). Users need to log in to NGC to access and deploy Riva services. This ensures that only authorized users can set up and manage Riva deployments.

NVIDIA Riva’s default access control mechanisms are designed to ensure secure deployment and operation. By default, Riva employs:

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): This allows administrators to define roles and assign permissions to users based on their roles.

There is authentication between NVIDIA NGC and Riva. When you pull Riva container images from NGC, you need to authenticate using your NGC API key. This involves:

  1. NGC CLI Configuration: You set up the NGC CLI with your API key, which acts as your authentication credential1.
  2. OAuth Token: The username for authentication is $oauthtoken, and the password is your NGC_API_KEY

Vulnerability details:

CVE-2025-23242 – NVIDIA Riva contains a vulnerability where a user could cause an improper access control issue. A successful exploit of this vulnerability might lead to escalation of privileges, data tampering, denial of service, or information disclosure.

CVE-2025-23243 – NVIDIA Riva contains a vulnerability where a user could cause an improper access control issue. A successful exploit of this vulnerability might lead to data tampering or denial of service.

Official announcement: Please see the official link for details –

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5625

CVE‑2025‑23360 – NVIDIA Nemo Framework contains a vulnerability (12th Mar 2025)

Preface: The symbol ~/. by itself is not a relative path traversal; it simply refers to the home directory of the current user. However, when combined with ./.., it can be part of a relative path traversal.

Relative path traversal involves using sequences like ../ to navigate up the directory hierarchy. For example, ~/. refers to the home directory, and ./.. moves up one directory level from the current directory. So, ~/. ./.. would navigate to the parent directory of the home directory, which can be considered a form of relative path traversal

Background: NVIDIA NeMo is an end-to-end platform designed for developing and deploying generative AI models. This includes large language models (LLMs), vision language models (VLMs), video models, and speech AI. NeMo offers tools for data curation, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and inference, making it a comprehensive solution for creating enterprise-ready AI models. Here are some key capabilities of NeMo LLMs:

  1. Customization: NeMo allows you to fine-tune pre-trained models to suit specific enterprise needs. This includes adding domain-specific knowledge and skills, and continuously improving the model with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
  2. Scalability: NeMo supports large-scale training and deployment across various environments, including cloud, data centers, and edge devices. This ensures high performance and flexibility for different use cases.
  3. Foundation Models: NeMo offers a range of pre-trained foundation models, such as GPT-8, GPT-43, and GPT-530, which can be used for tasks like text classification, summarization, creative writing, and chatbots.
  4. Data Curation: The platform includes tools for processing and curating large datasets, which helps improve the accuracy and relevance of the models.
  5. Integration: NeMo can be integrated with other NVIDIA AI tools and services, providing a comprehensive ecosystem for AI development.

Vulnerability details: NVIDIA Nemo Framework contains a vulnerability where a user could cause a relative path traversal issue by arbitrary file write. A successful exploit of this vulnerability may lead to code execution and data tampering.

Official announcement: Please see the official link for details

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5623

CVE-2024-0141: NVIDIA Hopper HGX for 8-GPU contains a vulnerability in GPU vBIOS  (10th Mar2025)

Last official update on February 28, 2025 at 3:28 PM

Preface: Hopper PPCIe is limited to HGX 8-way systems, where the eight GPUs and four NVSwitches are passed through to one VM. Other topologies are not supported.

Background: The GPU vBIOS can communicate through IOCTL (Input/Output Control) calls. IOCTL is a system call for device-specific input/output operations and other operations which cannot be expressed by regular system calls. In the context of GPU drivers, IOCTLs are used to interact with the GPU hardware, including tasks like memory management, command submission, and mode setting.

CUDA Interprocess Communication (IPC) is not supported in PPCIe mode. Developer tools such as NVIDIA Nsight for profiling are not supported in PPCIe mode.

When an IOCTL contains privileged functionality and is exposed unnecessarily, attackers may be able to access this functionality by invoking the IOCTL.

Vulnerability details: NVIDIA Hopper HGX for 8-GPU contains a vulnerability in the GPU vBIOS that may allow a malicious actor with tenant level GPU access to write to an unsupported registry causing a bad state. A successful exploit of this vulnerability may lead to denial of service.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details – https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5561

CVE-2024-0114: NVIDIA Hopper HGX for 8-GPU contains a vulnerability in the HGX Management Controller HMC (7 th March 2025)

Preface: NVIDIA collaborates with Supermicro for their server solutions, including the use of Supermicro’s BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) in certain systems. Supermicro provides a range of server solutions optimized for NVIDIA’s platforms.

Background: The NVIDIA Hopper HGX for 8 GPUs has several standout features:

High Performance: It hosts eight H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which are designed for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Advanced Connectivity: Each H100 GPU connects to four third-generation NVSwitches, enabling a fully connected topology. This setup allows any H100 GPU to communicate with any other H100 GPU concurrently at a bidirectional speed of 900 GB/s.

Enhanced Bandwidth: The NVLink ports provide more than 14 times the bandwidth of the current PCIe Gen4 x16 bus.

Vulnerability details: VIDIA Hopper HGX for 8-GPU contains a vulnerability in the HGX Management Controller (HMC) that may allow a malicious actor with administrative access on the BMC to access the HMC as an administrator. A successful exploit of this vulnerability may lead to code execution, denial of service, escalation of privileges, information disclosure, and data tampering.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details – https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5561

CVE-2024-36353: CROSS-PROCESS GPU MEMORY DISCLOSURE (27-02-2025)

Preface: Regarding its use in HPC clusters, the Radeon PRO V710 is indeed suitable. It is supported by AMD’s ROCm platform, which is optimized for HPC and AI workloads. Additionally, it is used in Azure’s NVads V710 v5-series virtual machines, which are designed for GPU-accelerated applications, including HPC.

Background: The global memory of the AMD Radeon™ PRO V710 is the 28 GB of GDDR6 memory. This memory is connected via a 224-bit memory interface and operates at an effective speed of 18 Gbps1. The memory is used for storing data that the GPU processes, such as textures, frame buffers, and other computational data.

The NVIDIA Container Toolkit is specifically designed to work with NVIDIA GPUs and their CUDA framework. It is not compatible with AMD GPUs. For AMD GPUs, you should use the ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) platform, which provides similar functionality for containerized environments.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) in AMD ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) serves as a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms, including CPUs, GPUs, and other processors. Specifically, in the context of AMD ROCm, OpenCL allows developers to harness the computational power of AMD GPUs for high-performance, data-parallel computing tasks.

Vulnerability details: Insufficient clearing of GPU global memory could allow a malicious process running on the same GPU to read left over memory values potentially leading to loss of confidentiality.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-6019.html

CVE-2024-0148: NVIDIA Jetson Linux and IGX OS image contains a vulnerability in the UEFI firmware RCM boot mode (25-02-2025)

Preface: NVIDIA IGX Orin software is used by a variety of organizations, particularly those in industrial and medical environments. This platform is designed to support AI applications at the edge, providing high performance, advanced functional safety, and security.

Some specific use cases include:

  • Industrial Automation: Companies use IGX Orin to enhance manufacturing processes with AI-driven automation and predictive maintenance.
  • Healthcare: Medical institutions leverage IGX Orin for AI-powered diagnostics, medical imaging, and patient monitoring.
  • Robotics: Robotics companies utilize IGX Orin for developing intelligent robots that can operate safely alongside humans.

The platform’s versatility and robust support make it suitable for any organization looking to deploy AI solutions in demanding environments.

Background: The NVIDIA IGX Orin Developer Kit runs the Holopack 2.0 Developer Preview software. Holopack is a comprehensive solution for end-to-end GPU accelerated AI application development and testing. Holopack supports two GPU modes:

iGPU – Holopack deploys drivers and libraries to support NVIDIA Ampere sets on NVIDIA IGX Orin modules into the GPU.

dGPU – Holopack deploys drivers and libraries to support optional NVIDIA RTX A6000 connected to PCIe slot Discrete GPU.

Its high-performance, low-power computing for deep learning, and computer vision makes Jetson the ideal platform for compute-intensive projects. The Jetson platform includes a variety of Jetson modules with NVIDIA JetPack™ SDK.

Vulnerability details: NVIDIA Jetson Linux and IGX OS image contains a vulnerability in the UEFI firmware RCM boot mode, where an unprivileged attacker with physical access to the device could load untrusted code. A successful exploit might lead to code execution, escalation of privileges, data tampering, denial of service, and information disclosure. The scope of the impacts can extend to other components.

Remark: UEFI supply-chain allows for many of these shared libraries to be integrated in various ways, including compiled from source, licensed for modification and reuse and finally as a dynamic or static linked executable.

Official announcement: Please refer to the vendor announcement for details – https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5617