NVIDIA Riva Vulnerabilities Let Attackers Escalate Privileges

NVIDIA has issued a significant software update for its Riva speech AI platform, releasing version 2.19.0 to resolve two high-severity vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-23242 and CVE-2025-23243) involving improper access control mechanisms. 

The update, detailed in a March 10, 2025 security bulletin, impacts all Linux deployments running Riva versions ≤2.18.0 and follows coordinated disclosure with  Trend Micro’s David Fiser and Alfredo Oliveira researchers.

Overview of the Vulnerabilities

The CVE-2025-23242 vulnerability (CVSS 7.3) exposes systems to privilege escalation vectors through improper access control in Riva’s service authentication layer. 

Attackers exploiting this flaw could execute arbitrary code with elevated permissions, manipulate real-time speech processing pipelines, or exfiltrate sensitive conversation logs from AI inference workloads. 

Its attack vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U) indicates network-based exploitation requiring no user interaction, making it particularly dangerous for exposed API endpoints.

CVE-2025-23243 (CVSS 6.5) presents a more limited but still critical risk profile, enabling unauthenticated actors to trigger denial-of-service conditions or tamper with text normalization outputs in neural machine translation (NMT) services. 

Both vulnerabilities stem from insufficient validation of gRPC request headers in Riva’s microservice architecture, as confirmed by NVIDIA’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT).

Mitigations

The security bulletin specifically impacts:

• Riva Speech Skills Server deployments using automatic speech recognition (ASR) or text-to-speech (TTS) pipelines
• NeMo-finetuned NMT models deployed through Riva ServiceMaker
• Real-time inference endpoints exposed via Kubernetes or Docker configurations

NVIDIA mandates an immediate upgrade to Riva 2.19.0, introducing enhanced role-based access control (RBAC) policies and hardened gRPC authentication protocols. For organizations unable to immediately patch, NVIDIA recommends:

• Segmenting Riva services behind API gateways with strict IP whitelisting
• Enabling mutual TLS (mTLS) for all inter-service communication
• Auditing riva-speech-client library usage in custom applications

The 2.19.0 update maintains backward compatibility with existing NeMo checkpoints but requires regenerating RMIR files using updated riva-build toolchain components. 

Organizations using custom voice fonts or domain-specific language models should validate acoustic properties post-upgrade, as the security patches modify low-level audio processing threads.

NVIDIA’s advisory emphasizes that these vulnerabilities affect all prior Riva versions, including Long-Term Support (LTS) branches. 

The company has released patched container images through the NGC Catalog and updated Helm charts for Kubernetes deployments.

As conversational AI systems become increasingly integrated with LLMs and RAG architectures, this incident serves as a critical reminder to implement zero-trust principles across all stages of speech AI development and deployment. 

NVIDIA plans to introduce automated vulnerability scanning for Riva model repositories in Q2 2025 as part of its enhanced security roadmap.

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