CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-3979 — Canonical Ubuntu Linux security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A remote denial-of-service vulnerability exists in the way the Nouveau Display Driver (the default Ubuntu Nvidia display driver) handles GPU shader execution. A specially crafted pixel shader can cause remote denial-of-service issues. An attacker can provide a specially crafted website to trigger this vulnerability. This vulnerability can be triggered remotely after the user visits a malformed website. No further user interaction is required. Vulnerable versions include Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (linux 4.15.0-29-generic x86_64), Nouveau Display Driver NV117 (vermagic: 4.15.0-29-generic SMP mod_unload).

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.0)
Published
2019-04-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
  • nvidia / geforce_gtx_745_firmware
  • nvidia / geforce_gtx_750_firmware
  • nvidia / geforce_gtx_750_ti_firmware
  • nvidia / geforce_gtx_840m_firmware
  • nvidia / geforce_gtx_845m_firmware

Showing 6 representative product identities from 17 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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