Making Vulnerable Drivers Exploitable Without Hardware - The BYOVD Perspective
Making Vulnerable Drivers Exploitable Without Hardware - The BYOVD Perspective
22 May 2026
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