Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Fellow at The Linux Foundation, seems in a position to lastly disable USB RNDIS protocol drivers as quickly as and for all. Apparently, Hartman has had wanted to remove the RNDIS bits from Linux for some time now as a result of the preliminary proposal was made once more in November 2022 on the twenty third.

Now, merely over two years shortly 23 December 2024, the commit has lastly been pushed as soon as extra. Inside the message accompanying it, Hartman outlined how this historic House home windows XP-era Microsoft protocol is not essential and it moreover 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 devices. On account of the protocol will not be doable to make secure, merely disable all rndis drivers to forestall anyone from using them as soon as extra. House home windows solely wished this for XP and newer strategies, House home windows strategies older than which will use the normal USB class protocols instead, which shouldn’t have these points. Android has had this disabled for a number of years so there should not be any precise strategies that additionally need this.

Yow will uncover the commit proper right here on the LKML public inbox.

For people who might be not acquainted, the RNDIS or Distant Group Driver Interface Specification is a bus-independent message protocol for Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) group devices on dynamic Plug and Play (PnP) buses similar to the USB, 1394, Bluetooth, and InfiniBand. This standardized methodology signifies {that a} set of host drivers may help any number of networking devices by way of the USB.

As talked about above, Microsoft debuted the spec once more throughout the House home windows XP days and it is nonetheless present on the nonetheless supported House home windows 10 and House home windows 11, along with on the latest mannequin, 24H2. Fortunately, though, the RNDIS driver does not mechanically arrange on House home windows 10 and 11.

Should you’re curious, House home windows 11 24H2 helps NDIS mannequin 6.89.