About 12 years ago I had several (big ISP) routers that were punting all ESP packets to the routing engine for forwarding, instead of the normal path of using A

About 12 years ago I had several (big ISP) routers that were punting all ESP packets to the routing engine for forwarding, instead of the normal path of using ASIC's on the line cards. This was noticed because I had some customers with a lot of IPSEC traffic and there is very little capacity to forward packets using the CPU on the routing engine, so packets were being dropped. When I opened a case with the hardware vendor and described the problem they immediately and tersely asked for a shipping address and how many cards I wanted to replace. They didn't even check for support contracts, which was unheard of especially for an expensive part like this. These routers were purchased on the grey market so I always assumed there was some kind of (botched?) tampering with the hardware and the vendor was at least aware of it.