Intel's connectivity suite optimizes your IPv6 straight into connection resets

Call: Hold on the OEM builds of Intel Connectivity Performance Suite (ICPS) that laptop makers preinstall and that Windows Update can quietly put back (one reporter says it reinstalled three times this year). This is reported, not confirmed: we count 2 independent first-hand reports (a Samsung Galaxy Book owner and an ASUS owner on Intel’s forum), with coverage from The Register and AskWoody. Neither Intel nor Microsoft has published anything.

What breaks: IPv6 connections reset, and IPv4 doesn’t. The OneNote desktop app says “We can’t get to your notebooks right now,” or shows empty notebooks marked “Up to date.” OneDrive and Microsoft 365 sign-in fail now and then, and browsers show ERR_CONNECTION_RESET. Teams, the Azure portal and Azure DevOps reset too. Your phone works fine, which is what makes this so fun to troubleshoot.

Why: The reporter’s packet captures show the OEM ICPS filter driver sending the TCP SYN with a normal IPv6 flow label, then zeroing the label on every packet after the handshake. Azure Front Door load-balances IPv6 on that label, so the rest of the connection lands on a different server, which resets it. Google, Cloudflare and Akamai don’t seem to care. The ASUS reporter saw 40-60% of IPv6 HTTPS connections to an AWS CloudFront site reset, so this isn’t only a Microsoft problem. The reporter says Microsoft’s Azure networking engineers confirmed the mechanism in writing and are working on a fix. Microsoft hasn’t said so publicly.

Who’s hit: Windows laptops with Intel Wi-Fi and an OEM ICPS build, on a network with native IPv6. Reported builds: 40.25.926.173 (Samsung), 40.25.725.165 (ASUS), and 4.1025.207.1. According to the reporter, the Microsoft Update Catalog lists them under submitters including Samsung, Lenovo, HP and ASUS. Intel’s generic build 50.26.623.243 doesn’t have the bug in the reporter’s tests.

Workaround:

Test it first: run curl.exe -6 -sS -o NUL -w "%{http_code}" https://api.onedrive.com/ ten times. Resets mean you’re probably affected. If -6 can’t connect at all, you have no IPv6 and this isn’t your problem.
Disable the ICPS services (INTCCoSvc, IDBWM, Intel Connectivity Network Service, IntelConnectService) and reboot, or replace the OEM build with Intel’s generic 50.26.623.243. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth keep working without ICPS.
Stop Windows Update from putting it back. Managed fleets can block the driver in WSUS or Intune. On a single PC, the Do not include drivers with Windows Update policy works, but it blocks every driver, so use it knowingly.

Sources: The Register (opens in a new tab), Intel Community (opens in a new tab), technical analysis (opens in a new tab), check and fix (opens in a new tab), timeline (opens in a new tab), AskWoody (opens in a new tab).

Intel's connectivity suite optimizes your IPv6 straight into connection resets

Sources

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