Re: [PATCH] USB: disable all RNDIS protocol drivers

Dan Williams
2022-11-29T22:49:24Z

On Wed, 2022-11-23 at 16:40 +0100, Nicolas Cavallari wrote:
> On 23/11/2022 13:46, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > The Microsoft RNDIS protocol is, as designed, insecure and
> > vulnerable on
> > any system that uses it with untrusted hosts or devices.  Because
> > the
> > protocol is impossible to make secure, just disable all rndis
> > drivers to
> > prevent anyone from using them again.
> >
> > Windows only needed this for XP and newer systems, Windows systems
> > older
> > than that can use the normal USB class protocols instead, which do
> > not
> > have these problems.
> >
> > Android has had this disabled for many years so there should not be
> > any
> > real systems that still need this.
>
> I kind of disagree here. I have seen plenty of android devices that
> only
> support rndis for connection sharing, including my android 11 phone
> released in Q3 2020. I suspect the qualcomm's BSP still enable it by
> default.
>
> There are also probably cellular dongles that uses rndis by default.
> Maybe ask the ModemManager people ?

Yes, there are.

Another class of WWAN dongles presented as USB RNDIS to the host, had
an onboard DHCP server, and "bridged" that (for lack of a better term)
to the WWAN. And like a home router exposed HTTP based management on
192.168.1.1 to control the WWAN stuff.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wan/wwan/ethernetoverusb_rndis

RE Wifi, (echoing Johannes) there was one Broadcom chipset, but a bunch
of devices used it. I have some though I don't actively use them. But
they still work...

Dan

>
> I'm also curious if reimplementing it in userspace would solve the
> security problem.
>