Intel NPU Driver for Windows Device Drivers race condition

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as critical has been found in Intel NPU Driver for Windows. This issue affects some unknown processing of the component Device Drivers. The manipulation leads to race condition. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2026-20908. Local access is required to approach this attack. No exploit exists.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, has been found in Intel NPU Driver for Windows (version now known). This issue affects some unknown processing of the component Device Drivers. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a race condition vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-362. The product contains a code sequence that can run concurrently with other code, and the code sequence requires temporary, exclusive access to a shared resource, but a timing window exists in which the shared resource can be modified by another code sequence that is operating concurrently. Impacted is availability. The summary by CVE is:

Time-of-check time-of-use race condition for the Intel(R) NPU Driver for Windows for all versions within Ring 1: Device Drivers may allow a denial of service. Unprivileged software adversary with an authenticated user combined with a high complexity attack may enable denial of service. This result may potentially occur via local access when attack requirements are 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-2026-20908 since 12/19/2025. 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 $0-$5k 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 for Windows

License

• commercial

Website

• Vendor: https://www.intel.com/

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CPE 2.2info

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