CVE-2026-20731 Denial of service in Intel(R) NPU Driver
An unprivileged local attacker can cause a denial of service in the Intel NPU Driver via improper buffer restrictions.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-20731?
CVE-2026-20731 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Intel(R) NPU Driver, published on 11 Aug 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
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.
Weakness: CWE-119
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-20731?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Intel Neural Processing Unit Driver.
How do I fix CVE-2026-20731?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2026-20731 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-20731 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Intel(R) NPU Driver
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2026-20731, GHSA-363q-22g7-fmmm.