CVE-2025-33235 is a race condition vulnerability classified under CWE-362, found in the checkpointing core of the NVIDIA Resiliency Extension for Linux. The vulnerability arises from improper synchronization when accessing shared resources concurrently, which can lead to unpredictable behavior and security flaws. An attacker with local access and limited privileges can exploit this race condition to cause information disclosure, data tampering, denial of service, or escalate their privileges on the affected system. The vulnerability affects all versions of the NVIDIA Resiliency Extension prior to 0.5.0 and 0.4.1. The CVSS v3.1 score is 7.8, indicating high severity, with an attack vector limited to local access (AV:L), low attack complexity (AC:L), requiring privileges (PR:L), no user interaction (UI:N), and impacting confidentiality, integrity, and availability at a high level (C:H/I:H/A:H). The vulnerability was reserved in April 2025 and published in December 2025. No public exploits have been reported yet, but the potential impact is significant due to the core role of checkpointing in system resiliency and recovery. The lack of available patches at the time of reporting necessitates immediate risk mitigation through access control and monitoring.

For European organizations, the impact of CVE-2025-33235 can be substantial, especially those relying on NVIDIA Resiliency Extension in Linux environments for critical systems requiring checkpointing and resiliency features. Successful exploitation could lead to unauthorized disclosure of sensitive data, manipulation of checkpoint data leading to corrupted recovery states, denial of service by disrupting checkpoint operations, or privilege escalation allowing attackers to gain higher system control. This could affect sectors such as finance, manufacturing, research, and government agencies that use NVIDIA hardware and software stacks for high-performance computing or AI workloads. The disruption of resiliency mechanisms could impair business continuity and recovery capabilities, increasing downtime and operational risk. Given the local access requirement, insider threats or attackers who have already compromised lower-level access could leverage this vulnerability to deepen their foothold.

European organizations should implement the following specific mitigations: 1) Immediately restrict local access to systems running NVIDIA Resiliency Extension to trusted administrators only, minimizing the attack surface. 2) Monitor and audit local user activities for suspicious behavior indicative of race condition exploitation attempts. 3) Employ mandatory access controls (e.g., SELinux, AppArmor) to limit the Resiliency Extension’s permissions and isolate its processes. 4) Prepare to deploy patches or updated versions (0.5.0 or later) as soon as NVIDIA releases them, and test updates in controlled environments before production rollout. 5) Use kernel-level security modules and integrity monitoring to detect anomalies in checkpointing operations. 6) Educate system administrators about the vulnerability and the importance of minimizing privilege assignments. 7) Consider temporary disabling or limiting the use of checkpointing features if feasible until patches are applied. These steps go beyond generic advice by focusing on access control, monitoring, and process isolation tailored to the nature of this race condition vulnerability.