NVIDIA released a patch for a critical bug in its high-performance line of DGX servers that could open the door for a remote attacker to take control of and access sensitive data on systems typically operated by governments and Fortune-100 companies.
In all, NVIDIA
issued nine patches, each fixing flaws in firmware used by DGX high-performance computing (HPC) systems, which are used for processor-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) tasks, machine learning and data modeling. All of the flaws are tied to its own firmware that runs on its DGX AMI baseboard management controller (BMC), the brains behind a remote monitoring service servers.
“Attacks can be remote (in case of internet connectivity), or if bad guys can root one of the boxes and get access to the BMC they can use the out of band management network to PWN the entire datacenter,” wrote researcher Sergey Gordeychik who is credited for finding the bugs. “If you have access to OOB, it is game is over for the target.”
Given the high-stake computing jobs typically running on the HPC systems, the researcher noted an adversary exploiting the flaw could “poison data and force models to make incorrect predictions or infect an AI model.”
threatpost.com
