Afterglow's attack surface is deliberately small:

• No kernel driver. All hardware access is through NVIDIA's userland driver libraries (nvml.dll, nvapi64.dll) that ship with every GeForce driver. Afterglow cannot be used as a bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver (BYOVD) primitive because it doesn't bring one.
• No network access. Afterglow makes no network requests: no telemetry, no update checks, no accounts. The only external binary is Intel's MIT-licensed PresentMon console app, bundled with a pinned SHA-256 that CI verifies (THIRD_PARTY.md).
• Elevation is scoped. Admin rights are required only because the driver requires them for writes (clocks/fans/power) and ETW tracing; monitoring runs unelevated.
• Settings/profiles are plain JSON under %ProgramData%\Afterglow — no registry writes except the optional Run key created by the installer's startup task.

%ProgramData% is writable by standard users by design, and the elevated Afterglow process reads profiles/settings from there. This is mitigated rather than eliminated: every value loaded from disk is schema-validated and then clamped to the driver-reported legal range before any write reaches the GPU, so a tampered profile cannot push the hardware beyond what the driver itself allows any tool to set. Hardening this further (ACL-restricted state directory) is tracked for a future release; treat local standard-user tampering as within the residual risk envelope of every tool in this category.

Please open a GitHub security advisory (Security → Report a vulnerability) or a private report to the maintainer rather than a public issue. Include reproduction steps and impact. You should get a response within a week; fixes for confirmed issues in the driver-write or elevation paths are prioritized above everything else.

The latest release is supported. Older releases receive fixes only for vulnerabilities that allow privilege escalation or arbitrary code execution.