CVE-2026-65130 in Infrastructure Controller
Summary
by MITRE • 09/22/2026
NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller for Linux contains a vulnerability where an attacker could cause OS command injection. A successful exploit of this vulnerability might lead to code execution, data tampering, denial of service, and information disclosure.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/22/2026
The NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller for Linux represents a critical component in modern high-performance computing and artificial intelligence clusters, serving as the management plane that orchestrates hardware resources, monitors system health, and facilitates communication between host operating systems and underlying infrastructure components such as GPUs, network interfaces, and storage subsystems. This software operates with elevated privileges to ensure it can perform necessary administrative tasks, including firmware updates, power management adjustments, and diagnostic data collection. The security posture of this controller is paramount because a compromise at this level effectively grants an attacker control over the physical or virtualized hardware resources managed by the system, bypassing many traditional operating system-level defenses that rely on user-space isolation.
The identified vulnerability constitutes a classic OS command injection flaw within the NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller for Linux. This type of weakness typically arises when the application constructs operating system commands dynamically using input data without sufficiently validating or sanitizing that input before execution. In this specific context, an attacker who has access to certain interfaces exposed by the controller—whether through local user accounts with limited privileges, network-accessible APIs, or management consoles—can inject malicious shell metacharacters such as semicolons, pipes, or backticks into these inputs. When the vulnerable component processes this input and passes it directly to a system call like execve or similar command execution functions, the operating system interprets the injected characters not as literal data but as instructions for new commands. This allows the attacker to execute arbitrary shell commands with the same privileges as the NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller process itself.
The operational impact of successfully exploiting this vulnerability is severe and multifaceted, primarily centered around remote or local code execution. Since the controller typically runs with high-level system permissions, an exploit can lead to full compromise of the host operating system. An attacker could install persistent backdoors, create new administrative accounts, or modify critical system configurations. Beyond direct code execution, this vulnerability enables data tampering by allowing unauthorized modifications to configuration files, logs, and managed device states. It also facilitates information disclosure, as the attacker can read sensitive files such as private keys, credential stores, or proprietary driver binaries that are accessible to the controller process. Furthermore, a denial of service condition can be triggered either intentionally through resource exhaustion attacks launched via injected commands or inadvertently by crashing the management daemon, which would disrupt cluster operations and halt AI training jobs or high-performance computing tasks dependent on stable infrastructure availability.
From a classification perspective, this vulnerability aligns with CWE-78 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command commonly known as OS Command Injection. The attack vector often relates to CWE-20 Improvement of Input Validation if the root cause is insufficient sanitization, and it may involve CWE-434 Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type if file upload mechanisms are part of the injection path. In terms of adversary tactics, this exploit maps directly to MITRE ATT&CK technique T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter, specifically allowing for lateral movement within a cluster or privilege escalation from a lower-privileged account to root-level access on management nodes. The ability to execute arbitrary commands effectively breaks the trust boundary between user-space applications and kernel-managed hardware resources.
Mitigation strategies must address both immediate remediation and long-term architectural hardening. NVIDIA typically releases patches that update the Infrastructure Controller software to versions where input validation is strictly enforced, ensuring that all external inputs are sanitized against a whitelist of allowed characters or properly escaped before being passed to system commands. Administrators should apply these updates immediately upon availability in production environments. In addition to patching, defense-in-depth measures include restricting network access to management interfaces using firewalls and VLAN segmentation so that only authorized management stations can communicate with the controller. Principle of least privilege should be enforced by ensuring that no user or service account has unnecessary write permissions to configuration directories used by the controller. Regular auditing of system logs for unusual command execution patterns and monitoring for anomalous process creation events can also help detect exploitation attempts early, although prevention through patching remains the most effective control against this class of vulnerability.