This seems to be related to “ASUS Healing System” which I don’t even know if I have enabled or not.
That name already sounds creepy enough, but searching for that string (with the quotes) currently returns only 4 results, of people asking what it is. My guess is some sort of hidden backdoor, disguised as an ostensibly useful feature.
I'm going to take a wild guess that the "ASUS Healing System" periodically checks system health and reboots a Daemon or the whole system if stuff breaks.
That seems to be the way to keep consumer grade routers from requiring the user walk over and reboot them once a week...
They’re underpowered devices with almost no RAM, being asked to push traffic for ever faster internet connections. It’s a miracle consumer grade routers as well as they do.
The configuration space of any complex system diverges exponentially with respect to time. This is as true for computers as it is for you. Biologically, you start life with one set of genes and end life as a chimera, full of mutations.
In this particular case, the set of states that the device is in when it boots is relatively small compared to the set of states that device may be in a week later. More generally, all individual complex systems need to be "restarted" periodically, it's just a question of how often.
A lot of times its software errors caused by powerline ingress from poor electrical isolation at the plug. If the wrong bits get flipped from EM interactions, only quick way to fix it is to reboot and reload.
Domestic routers, in particular, are infamous for their web interface and management daemons often calling command line programs through system() to configure the network (and other system management tasks), instead of directly using the APIs these command line programs use. Not only is this inefficient and fragile, it also not rarely leads to being vulnerable to shell injection attacks (if you're lucky, only exploitable by authenticated users of the web interface).
A lot of routers have this healing system built in. I had a netgear at close to the end of life which was two years After I bought it (I think), would reboot every hour. It was ok for the most part until my uncle came from elsewhere and was working remotely on a video call. It drove him bonkers.
I assume that ASUS routers are based on Linux, so shouldn't the source for these routers be readily available? I am able to find custom third party mods (asuswrt-merlin) but I can't actually find a clear copy of the original sources!
This is very common when I look to find source for embedded devices like this. What I expect is the next step is that you will find (or be given) a borderline useless blob of source that doesn't explain any of it's build process, which is absurd because the GPL clearly defines the build "glue" as part of the source.
Is ASUS another company that is doing a poor job of GPL compliance in this space?
Userspace programs do not have to be GPL to comply with a GPL-licensed kernel or even with other GPL-licensed userspace programs that they interact with.
> AsusWRT is a derivative of Tomato which is itself one of the descendants of HyperWRT, a Linux distribution for low-end network appliances such as routers.
I Just looked at it, I remember that the original source was available from the support page(don't remember if you had to have the product registered though), but I can no longer find it. Maybe they switched to a manual request process?
That name already sounds creepy enough, but searching for that string (with the quotes) currently returns only 4 results, of people asking what it is. My guess is some sort of hidden backdoor, disguised as an ostensibly useful feature.