CVE-2026-20747

Executive Summary

CVE-2026-20747 is an unpatched denial-of-service vulnerability in the device driver component of Intel PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software. An unauthenticated network adversary positioned within adjacent wireless range can trigger a low-complexity attack that requires no user interaction and no special internal knowledge. Successful exploitation results in a high availability impact on the affected system, crashing or destabilizing the wireless driver; confidentiality and integrity are not impacted.

Technical Analysis

The vulnerability is classified under CWE-754 (Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions). The NVD description indicates that the flaw resides within the device drivers bundled with Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software. The affected component fails to verify that specific runtime conditions are valid before proceeding with a particular operation. In a wireless device driver, such a check failure typically manifests as a missing or incomplete validation step in the frame-processing or event-handling path — for example, an unexpected management frame subtype, a malformed frame field, or a state transition that should not occur under normal operating conditions. Because the exceptional condition is not detected and handled, the driver enters an unhandled state that terminates the driver or destabilizes the system, producing a denial-of-service condition.

Attack surface: the wireless network interface, reachable by any radio within the effective range of the target's Wi-Fi adapter. The NVD description specifies "adjacent access" as the attack vector, meaning the adversary does not require connectivity to a routable network or the internet — only proximity to the victim's Wi-Fi network.

Preconditions per the NVD description:

• Authentication: none (unauthenticated adversary)
• Complexity: low
• User interaction: none
• Special internal knowledge: not required
• Access vector: adjacent (same wireless environment)

Impact per the NVD description:

• Confidentiality: none
• Integrity: none
• Availability: high
• Subsequent system impacts: confidentiality none, integrity none, availability none

This final clause is important: the denial of service does not cascade into further system compromise — no data exposure, no code execution, and no integrity violation are attributed to this vulnerability. The CVSS base score and vector have not been published, so the report relies on the qualitative metrics stated in the NVD description. The vendor has not disclosed affected version ranges, and no patch or advisory has been identified from any tracked source as of this writing.

Exploitation Scenarios

No public proof-of-concept, exploit code, or Nuclei template is available for CVE-2026-20747. The attack chain below is inferred at the vulnerability-class level from the NVD description and CWE-754 semantics.

1. Reconnaissance / target identification The adversary scans the wireless environment for a target running Intel PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software (commonly present on enterprise laptops and mobile workstations using Intel Wi-Fi adapters). No special internal knowledge is required; the attacker only needs to identify a reachable station on a Wi-Fi network. Adjacent access implies the attacker is within radio range of the target's access point or client device.

2. Triggering the flaw The attacker transmits crafted or anomalous wireless frames toward the target station. At the vulnerability-class level, the input is designed to place the driver in an unusual or exceptional condition — such as an unexpected frame type, an out-of-sequence management frame, or a condition the driver does not validate. Because the "conditions check" is improper (CWE-754), the driver fails to reject or gracefully handle this input.

3. Payload / execution method There is no payload in the traditional sense; the malicious input is the wireless frame sequence itself. The driver processes the exceptional condition without a correct guard, causing an unhandled internal state, driver fault, or system-level failure that leads to the denial of service.

4. Post-exploitation impact The target loses wireless connectivity, may experience driver restarts, or may crash at the system level. Repeated triggering allows the adversary to maintain the denial of service. Per the NVD description, there is no confidentiality or integrity impact, no privilege escalation, and no lateral movement enabled by this vulnerability.

Impact Assessment

The security impact is confined to system and driver availability. Environments with heavy reliance on Wi-Fi connectivity — corporate offices, warehouses, hospitals, educational campuses, and industrial sites using Intel wireless adapters — are the primary candidates for business disruption. A single crash may be benign; however, an adversary can repetitively trigger the condition to cause sustained outages, forcing manual reconnection or device reboots across many endpoints.

From a risk perspective:

• CVSS score/vector: N/A (not published). Qualitative metrics: AV:A / AC:L / PR:N / UI:N / C:N / I:N / A:H.
• EPSS: 0.00172 (6.8th percentile) — currently very low predicted exploitation probability.
• CISA KEV: not listed — no known exploited-in-the-wild status.
• Patch confidence: 0/4 — the absence of a vendor fix raises the strategic risk; the vulnerability is permanent until Intel ships an updated driver package.

Because the affected component is a kernel-level device driver (listed by the CNA as "Ring 2: Device Drivers"), a driver fault may present as a Windows bug check (blue screen) rather than a recoverable application crash, amplifying operational impact relative to a userspace denial of service.

Detection Guidance

Detection is challenging because the trigger occurs inside the wireless driver, and no public signature or exploit artifact exists. The rules below are built around observable post-crash telemetry and Layer-2 heuristics. Shodan is not a meaningful collection surface for this vulnerability, since the target is a client-side Wi-Fi driver; the dorks listed in METADATA are for general OSINT triage only.

Sigma Rule

title: Intel PROSet Wireless Driver Crash - Potential CVE-2026-20747 DoS
id: 7d5a3f2c-9b1e-4c6a-b8a2-0f4e1d3c9a71
status: experimental
description: Detects Windows System and Application event log entries consistent with a crash or restart of Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software components, which may indicate a denial-of-service attempt.
references:
    - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-20747
tags:
    - attack.impact
    - attack.t1499
logsource:
    product: windows
    service: system
detection:
    selection_crash:
        EventID:
            - 1001          # Windows Error Reporting (application/driver crash)
            - 41            # Kernel-Power (unexpected shutdown)
            - 6008          # Unexpected shutdown
    selection_keywords:
        - 'PROSet'
        - 'Wireless WiFi'
    condition: selection_crash and selection_keywords
falsepositives:
    - Legitimate driver instability or corruption
    - Unrelated system crashes coinciding with wireless driver operation
level: medium

YARA Rule

/*
 * YARA rule for triage of documents, advisories, and downloaded artifacts
 * referencing CVE-2026-20747. Binary-level detection of the vulnerable
 * driver is not possible at this time because no affected version strings
 * or file hashes are disclosed.
 */
rule CVE_2026_20747_Intel_ProSet_Reference
{
    meta:
        description = "Detects files referencing CVE-2026-20747 or Intel PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software in the context of denial-of-service weakness"
        author = "Valtersit Threat Intelligence"
        cve = "CVE-2026-20747"
        cwe = "CWE-754"
    strings:
        $cve = "CVE-2026-20747" ascii wide
        $prod1 = "PROSet/Wireless WiFi" ascii wide
        $prod2 = "Intel PROSet" ascii wide
        $weak = "denial of service" ascii wide
    condition:
        $cve and any of ($prod*) or ($prod1 and $weak)
}

Suricata IDS Rule

# Heuristic rule: detects bursts of 802.11 deauthentication management frames
# commonly observed during wireless denial-of-service attempts. Note: CVE-2026-20747
# is triggered inside the driver, so network detection is a behavioral heuristic
# rather than a deterministic signature. Requires capture of 802.11 frames
# (monitor-mode or WIDS tap); does not fire on normal Ethernet-encapsulated traffic.
alert ether any any -> any any (msg:"CVE-2026-20747 Possible Wireless Deauthentication Flood"; content:"|c0|"; offset:0; threshold:type both, track by_src, count 50, seconds 10; classtype:attempted-dos; sid:202620747; rev:1;)

Elastic Detection

// Correlates an unexpected system restart (Kernel-Power) with a Windows Error
// Reporting event referencing the Intel wireless software package.
sequence by host.name with maxspan=10m
  [ any where event.code == "41" and event.provider == "Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power" ]
  [ any where event.code == "1001" and (message like "*PROSet*" or message like "*Wireless WiFi*") ]

Splunk SPL Query

index=windows (EventCode=1001 OR EventCode=41 OR EventCode=6008)
| where match(message, "(?i)(PROSet|Wireless WiFi)")
| stats count min(_time) max(_time) by host, SourceName, EventCode
| sort - count

Wazuh OSSEC Rule

<rule id="100347" level="10">
  <decoded_as>windows_eventchannel</decoded_as>
  <field name="win.system.eventID">^(1001|41|6008)$</field>
  <match>PROSet|Wireless WiFi</match>
  <description>Intel PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software component crash detected - possible CVE-2026-20747 denial of service.</description>
  <mitre>
    <id>T1499</id>
  </mitre>
  <group>intel_proset_dos,</group>
</rule>

Mitigation & Patch Guidance

Patch confidence for CVE-2026-20747 is 0/4 — no patch evidence exists from any tracked source, and Intel has not published a fix, affected version list, or workaround. The following guidance is therefore risk-reduction focused.

1. Immediate mitigations

• Treat the local wireless network as an untrusted boundary. Restrict access to Wi-Fi networks by requiring WPA3/802.1X authentication so that only authorized supplicants can achieve adjacent proximity to target stations.
• Disable the wireless adapter on systems that have wired connectivity and do not require mobility, particularly in sensitive or high-availability environments.
• Deploy WIDS/WIPS monitoring to detect deauthentication/disassociation anomalies and other wireless management-frame abuse.
• Establish alerting on Windows Error Reporting (Event ID 1001), Kernel-Power (Event ID 41), and unexpected shutdown (Event ID 6008) events where the affected driver is named.

2. Patch / upgrade steps

• No vendor fix is currently available. Subscribe to Intel's security advisory feed and PROSet/Wireless WiFi Software release notes; when a patched driver package is released, deploy it through the enterprise software management toolchain (e.g., SCCM, Intune, WSUS for driver packages) immediately.
• Track the CVE in your vulnerability management system with a "monitoring" status until a fix is published; do not close the finding on the basis of low EPSS alone, as the adjacent, unauthenticated, low-complexity profile makes it attractive to wireless attackers.

3. Long-term hardening

• Centralize driver and firmware version control for wireless adapters to allow rapid rollout of the vendor fix once available.
• Conduct periodic wireless penetration testing to validate the exposure of the adjacent-access attack surface.
• Segment networks so that Wi-Fi clients are isolated from critical backend systems, limiting the operational blast radius of a wireless-driven availability incident even if alternative exploitation paths emerge.
• Maintain and test incident-response runbooks for wireless denial-of-service events, including procedures to re-authenticate or quarantine affected clients.

References

• NVD Entry: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-20747
• CVE Record (CVE.org): https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-20747
• CWE-754 — Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/754.html
• MITRE ATT&CK T1499 — Endpoint Denial of Service: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1499/
• CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog (CVE not listed): https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog

No evidence of exploitation in the wild, public proof-of-concept, or threat-actor campaign was identified in tracked sources at the time of writing.