Intel NPU Driver buffer overflow

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability has been found in Intel NPU Driver and classified as problematic. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown functionality. The manipulation leads to buffer overflow. This vulnerability is listed as CVE-2026-20731. The attack must be carried out locally. There is no available exploit.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Intel NPU Driver (the affected version unknown). It has been rated as problematic. This issue affects an unknown part. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a buffer overflow vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-120. The product copies an input buffer to an output buffer without verifying that the size of the input buffer is less than the size of the output buffer, leading to a buffer overflow. Impacted is integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

Improper buffer restrictions for the Intel(R) NPU Driver for all versions within Ring 3: User Applications may allow a denial of service. Unprivileged software adversary with an authenticated user combined with a low complexity attack may enable denial of service. This result may potentially occur via local access when attack requirements are not present without special internal knowledge and requires no user interaction. The potential vulnerability may impact the confidentiality (none), integrity (low) and availability (high) of the vulnerable system, resulting in subsequent system confidentiality (none), integrity (none) and availability (none) impacts.

It is possible to read the advisory at intel.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-20731 since 12/18/2025. The exploitation is known to be easy. Attacking locally is a requirement. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not publicly available. The pricing for an exploit might be around USD $5k-$25k at the moment (estimation calculated on 08/11/2026).

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

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Productinfo

Type

• Hardware Driver Software

Vendor

• Intel

Name

• NPU Driver

License

• commercial

Website

• Vendor: https://www.intel.com/

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