The Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) is a

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

proprietary protocol In telecommunications, a proprietary protocol is a communications protocol owned by a single organization or individual. Intellectual property rights and enforcement Ownership by a single organization gives the owner the ability to place restricti ...

used mostly on top of

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

. It provides a virtual

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

link to most versions of the

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

operating systems. Multiple revisions of a partial RNDIS specification are available from Microsoft, but Windows implementations have been observed to issue requests not included in that specification, and to have undocumented constraints. The protocol is tightly coupled to Microsoft's programming interfaces and models, most notably the

Network Driver Interface Specification The Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) is an application programming interface (API) for network interface controllers (NICs). Specification It was jointly developed by Microsoft and 3Com Corporation and is mostly used in Microsoft Wi ...

(NDIS), which are alien to operating systems other than Windows. This complicates implementing RNDIS on non-Microsoft operating systems, but Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD implement RNDIS natively. The

USB Implementers Forum USB Implementers Forum, Inc. (USB-IF) is a nonprofit organization created to promote and maintain USB (Universal Serial Bus), a set of specifications and transmission procedures for a type of cable connection that has since become used widely fo ...

(USB-IF) defines at least three non-proprietary USB communications device class (USB CDC) protocols with comparable "virtual Ethernet" functionality; one of them (CDC-ECM) predates RNDIS and is widely used for interoperability with non-Microsoft operating systems, but does not work with Windows. Most versions of Android include RNDIS USB functionality. For example,

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

smartphones have the capability and use RNDIS over USB to operate as a virtual Ethernet card that will connect the host PC to the mobile or Wi-Fi network in use by the phone, effectively working as a

mobile broadband modem A mobile broadband modem, also known as wireless modem or cellular modem, is a type of modem that allows a personal computer or a router to receive wireless Internet access via a mobile broadband connection instead of using telephone or cable ...

or a wireless card, for mobile hotspot tethering.

Controversy

In 2022 it was suggested that support for RNDIS should be removed from Linux, claiming that is inherently and uncorrectably insecure in the presence of untrusted USB devices. Although the claims said that Android have removed RNDIS "for years", most if not all Android devices released before 2024, with the exception of Google Pixel 6 and newer, are still using RNDIS in order to keep the driver-free experience with older systems such as Windows 7.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Overview of Remote NDIS (RNDIS)
Microsoft application programming interfaces Computer networking

Controversy

See also

References

External links