Intel NPU Driver privileges management

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability described as problematic has been identified in Intel NPU Driver. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown functionality. Such manipulation leads to privileges management. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2026-20769. Local access is required to approach this attack. No exploit exists.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Intel NPU Driver (unknown version) and classified as problematic. Affected by this issue is an unknown code block. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a privileges management vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-269. The product does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor. Impacted is integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

Improper conditions check 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.

The advisory is shared for download at intel.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-20769 since 12/19/2025. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack needs to be approached locally. There are neither technical details nor an exploit publicly available. The current price for an exploit might be approx. USD $5k-$25k (estimation calculated on 08/11/2026). The MITRE ATT&CK project declares the attack technique as T1068.

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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