Making Vulnerable Drivers Exploitable Without Hardware - The BYOVD Perspective

1 Introduction This article provides a technical analysis of how many Windows kernel mode drivers can be interacted with from user mode without the hardware they were developed for. This work was motivated by driver-oriented vulnerability research and the need to evaluate the exploitability of individual findings, which frequently affect code whose reachability is hardware-gated. The

The article analyzes how attackers can interact with vulnerable Windows kernel-mode drivers from user mode even without the associated physical hardware, by creating software-emulated device nodes with spoofed hardware IDs and leveraging tools like devcon.exe to trigger driver initialization paths relevant to BYOVD (Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver) exploitation.[1] It shows that many driver vulnerabilities considered hardware-gated can, in practice, be reached and potentially exploited entirely from user space, expanding the real-world attack surface.[1] From a CyberSE.AI perspective, this technique can be operationalized and automated by AI-powered agents to systematically discover, weaponize, and chain BYOVD-capable drivers in large environments, enabling stealthy privilege escalation and defense evasion. Securing AI agents that interact with endpoints must therefore include hardening against automated driver abuse (e.g., restricting driver loading, monitoring devcon-like behavior, and validating kernel interactions) and ongoing red teaming to detect AI-assisted workflows that probe for or exploit vulnerable drivers.