This post was originally published in French only. We translated it in 2026 so the archive reads the same in both languages. Read the original →
A very interesting article was posted on /. today about packets of death and Intel network cards. The author used a packet generation and analysis tool to help Intel identify a bug in the EEPROM of 82574L network controllers.
Packets of death are packets that kill a device, a network connection or an interface. In this case, it was apparently the controller code misinterpreting the interface shutdown command. You don't even need an operating system to be affected! Even at boot, it's vulnerable...imagine that in production on hypervisors! On top of that, the e100e driver on VMWare 5.1 happens to emulate 82574Ls... The icing on the cake would be if ping -p 32 -s 1110 x.x.x.x` worked!
This kind of problem isn't new, if this link is anything to go by. Yet another reason why it's good to have VLANs :)