This is an informational notice only, this is not a maintenance notice and this is not issue affecting NFOrce.

During June 2015 our NOC team at NFOrce discovered a bug that affects all Brocade MLXe/XMR routers which are running the latest firmware releases. This bug causes these routers to instantly crash and reload, continuously.

We have been debugging this issue further and we can now conclude that this bug is present in the 5800b release (rls date 2015-05-22) and 5700d (rls date 2015-07-13). We are reasonable sure that versions 5600f, 5600fb, 5600b and 5600ff (rls date 2015-07-15) are also affected and thereby vulnerable. This means that initially only 5800 tree was affected and that since July this year the 5600 and 5700 trees became affected and vulnerable as well.

These crashes are caused by specific configurations set in the announcements done by remote BGP peers. These configuration settings are most likely set by mistake or by providers who do not clean up their network announcements before (re)announcing them to their peers.

As this now affects all the latest versions in the mostly used trees, we expect that this will cause a more global issue in the coming weeks when providers are upgrading their routers to these latest firmware releases.

For security reasons we will not publicly publish how to replicate this bug, especially as this bug causes instant crashes and reloads and can be caused by any remote BGP peer. However if you are affected by this bug you can contact our NOC and we are more than happy to help you resolve this.

Please note that we are and were never at risk/affected as we are filtering out the affected settings before having our routers install these routes. We however would like to warn everyone to not upgrade to these firmware versions and wait for the future releases.