Summary
NVIDIA Dynamo for Linux contains a pathname-handling vulnerability in its image loading component. If an attacker can influence the image path or related input, they may access files outside the intended restricted directory, potentially causing information disclosure.
Affected context
The vulnerability occurs in deployments of NVIDIA Dynamo for Linux where the image loading component accepts or processes attacker-influenced path information. Risk depends on whether untrusted users, requests, images, or metadata can affect the path selected for loading and whether the process can read files beyond the intended directory.
Exploit preconditions
- Attack surface: The image loading component and its pathname-processing logic
- Required access: Ability to influence an image path or an input that is used to construct one
- Trigger point: Image loading or related file access
- Why exploitation is possible: Path validation may not sufficiently constrain the resolved path to the designated directory
Why this happens
The underlying bug is improper limitation of a pathname to a restricted directory. This maps to CWE-22: Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal'), where path input is insufficiently validated or canonicalized before filesystem access, allowing references to escape the intended location.
Potential impact
- An attacker may read files outside the intended image directory
- Sensitive configuration or application data could be disclosed
- Credentials, tokens, or other secrets may be exposed if readable by the affected process
- Information obtained from the host or container could support further attacks
General mitigation guidance
Mitigation generally focuses on enforcing a strong filesystem trust boundary
around image loading.
Common defensive patterns include:
- Resolve and canonicalize paths before access, then verify they remain beneath the approved directory
- Prefer controlled identifiers or managed file handles over attacker-supplied filesystem paths
- Reject traversal components, ambiguous encodings, symbolic-link escapes, and unexpected path forms
- Apply allowlists for permitted image locations and file types
- Run the image-loading process with only the filesystem permissions it requires
- Keep sensitive files outside directories readable by the component
How teams detect issues like this
Organizations can look for path traversal risks through:
- Static analysis rules for filesystem APIs receiving user-controlled or metadata-derived paths
- Code review checks for missing canonicalization and directory-boundary validation
- Tests covering traversal sequences, encoded separators, absolute paths, symbolic links, and normalization edge cases
- Runtime monitoring for unexpected file reads outside approved image directories
- Policy enforcement that restricts image loaders to designated storage locations
Automated code review and security scanning tools may help identify unsafe path
construction and insufficient containment checks.
