Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Fellow at The Linux Basis, appears able to lastly disable USB RNDIS protocol drivers as soon as and for all. Apparently, Hartman has had needed to take away the RNDIS bits from Linux for a while now because the preliminary proposal was made again in November 2022 on the twenty third.

Now, simply over two years in a while 23 December 2024, the commit has lastly been pushed once more. Within the message accompanying it, Hartman defined how this historical Home windows XP-era Microsoft protocol is now not crucial and it additionally makes the system insecure and weak to threats. He wrote:

USB: disable all RNDIS protocol drivers

The Microsoft RNDIS protocol is, as designed, insecure and weak on any system that makes use of it with untrusted hosts or gadgets. As a result of the protocol is not possible to make safe, simply disable all rndis drivers to forestall anybody from utilizing them once more. Home windows solely wanted this for XP and newer methods, Home windows methods older than that may use the traditional USB class protocols as a substitute, which should not have these issues. Android has had this disabled for a few years so there shouldn’t be any actual methods that also want this.

Yow will discover the commit right here on the LKML public inbox.

For individuals who is probably not acquainted, the RNDIS or Distant Community Driver Interface Specification is a bus-independent message protocol for Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) community gadgets on dynamic Plug and Play (PnP) buses just like the USB, 1394, Bluetooth, and InfiniBand. This standardized method signifies that a set of host drivers can help any variety of networking gadgets through the USB.

As talked about above, Microsoft debuted the spec again within the Home windows XP days and it’s nonetheless current on the nonetheless supported Home windows 10 and Home windows 11, together with on the newest model, 24H2. Thankfully, although, the RNDIS driver doesn’t mechanically set up on Home windows 10 and 11.

If you’re curious, Home windows 11 24H2 helps NDIS model 6.89.