Windows XP SP3 Causing Router Crashes

KrispyBytes writes "Windows XP SP3 has been named as the culprit causing home routers to go into a crash and reboot cycle. One router maker has released firmware updates to fix the problem, but has not yet revealed what is actually different about XP SP3's networking stack or UPnP behaviour that causes the problem. Router maker Billion Managing Director Raaj Menon said "as Microsoft plans to make Windows XP SP3 an automatic upgrade this month, the number of affected routers may increase significantly.""

Comments

Before anyone goes on a MS rant

[Gregb05]

A computer on the network should not be able to crash the router. This is a problem with the manufacturing of the routers, not anything in particular with SP3. This problem could have arisen in any OS. The fact that it appeared with SP3 is irrelevant. I return you to your MS bashing.

Re:Before anyone goes on a MS rant

[John Hasler]

> It is the manufactures fault that thier crashing, but this bug wouldnt be seen if xp was
> behaving correctly.

Nonsense. Any router that can be crashed by anything that a computer connected to it does has a critical bug and should be recalled immediately.

Re:Before anyone goes on a MS rant

[jellomizer]

However... If they find out what causes the router to crash with SP3 then all it will take is someone to duplicate the information sent and crash the router again and again. If the router crashes is has to be the fault of the router not of the OS, as other routers don't crash. As well as a poorly designed website. If your web browser crashes from a badly made website then it is the web browsers faults. Your argument only really holds true in cases of custom designed software where the sender of the data will need to agree to send the data in the correct format as well the receiver agrees to get the data in the correct format. And still even in that case a good program will be able to atleast say something is wrong, vs. it crashing.

Re:Before anyone goes on a MS rant

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets make this easier and flat out assume XP's UPnP implementation was intentionally designed to crash the largest number of routers on the planet in a clever bid to raise Vista sales.

Even with this unlikely assumption in play it would still be 100% the fault of the router for crashing.

Re:Before anyone goes on a MS rant

[postbigbang]

Everyone wants a bulletproof, but quickly reacting app. Sometimes you can't have both. You can build parsers that vet web pages for sanity sake (or just look for malware as some plugins do), but they'll slow down even the fastest clocking machines; the insertion loss of the parser will be like putting a foot on the garden hose.

Routers and layer 2/3 bridges have to react at wire speed, and therefore have lean, racing engine code with only the barest of exception handlers. Inside the code are lots of routines that have to react to protocol changes related to table building. Screw up those tables even legally (according to the obscurities of even well-known protocols) and the routing/bridging device will behave badly, even to the point of apparently not working. It's happened before, and will happen again. Is it XP3? No one knows yet.

The next update of will likely fix the problem; likely it would arrive before a Microsoft fix, and it would be more effective to fix the crashing device than go after all possible XP SP3 users. Sadly, once in the 'wild', it's the router vendor's problem rather than Microsoft's, no matter who is to blame for the original mistake.

Blaming the wrong programmers

[Jeffrey Baker]

Shouldn't the title of this post be "Shitty router programming causing router crashes"? It should matter what type of garbage come off the wire, the router must be able to handle it all without error.

Re:Blaming the wrong programmers

[Jugalator]

Agreed. If SP3 can do this unintentionally, imagine what the series of communicated data with the routers can do if a malicious writer now reverse-engineer whatever SP3 is doing, and would spread a time-triggered virus, for example. These kind of hardware issues are never good.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets not jump to blame this on Windows. It could be that Windows isn't doing anything wrong, just something the router should be able to handle, but can't. We can point fingers when we know what the actual issue causing the router problems is.

Buggy Routers

[John Hasler]

Any router that can be crashed by anything that any of the computers connected to it do is seriously buggy. This is not Microsoft's fault.

Re:Oh brother...

[spazdor]

is a coincidence, or just completely made up

Unlikely, given that the OP mentions that at least one manufacturer has fixed the problem with a firmware update. You can't really write software to fix a problem until you've figured out what the problem is.

You're right though, a properly hardened router will keep ticking regardless of what's plugged into it. Mostly.

maybe, maybe not

[frovingslosh]

I agree that no router should crash based just on packets it passes. But there are a few issues here. If SP3 is causing something akin to a DOS, and a router's tables are filling up due to bad packets, it might very reasonably decide that things are so bad that the best thing for it to do is a reset. We don't blame the router maker when an external DOS attack interrupts Internet access, why blame it if the DOS is from Microsoft software on the inside?

And there is also the potential issue of this being UPNP related. UPNP is a completely bogus thing, but Microsoft strong armed the industry to support it and it's in most routers and many users don't know to disable it. UPNP could certainly give ways to cause this issue, and I only hold the router itself responsible to the extent that it supports this blasphemy.

Not MS to blame

[Opportunist]

As much as I hate defending the Redmond Computer Virus (tm), that's the router's fault.

Now, if SP3 created nonstandard packets that most routers still swallow but a router drops because they don't work to spec, blame MS. If the router replied with a bogus message to said nonstandard packet that locked up XP, blame MS. But a router HAS TO be able to accept a bogus packet. It may drop it, report it or if it feels like it send it on a roundtrip in hope that some machine can figure out what it's about, but it may NEVER crash due to it.

I hope I don't have to mention the security implications of this.

NAPT != Firewall

[Luke-Jr]

uPNP configures port forwarding for a NAPT (aka NAT) router. NAPT/NAT is *not* a firewall, and should not be treated like one. Its sole purpose is to translate addresses and ports (Network Address and Port Translating) between the internal and external networks. It is not meant to protect computers on either end from each other. uPNP facilitates the NAPT job by giving applications an easy way to automate the needed port forwarding for the WAN->LAN direction. If you want a firewall, get a real firewall.

apples to oranges

[spazdor]

Did the hardware manufacturers all just write flawless Linux drivers and buggy Windows ones?

Or did Linux developers just go a step further than Windows did, and take it upon themselves to make sure that hardware works properly on their OS?

Re:Nah...

[cnettel]

If you can crash the router, you have a possible DDoS attack. If you can do it on the WAN port, it would certainly be a flaw in the device. Depending on the crashing behavior, it is also possible that this is actually an exploitable path that could be used to permanently reflash the router for malevolent purposes.