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For national security sake all routers should be required to support open firmwares.
[0] https://semiengineering.com/a-crisis-in-dods-trusted-foundry...
Until there is some legally required amount of time to provide security updates for connected devices, I would expect the "buy a new one if you want to be protected" response to continue indefinitely.
There's also just you know, installing Custom Firmware if you're determined enough.
And once again, we're all reminded of the divide between people who know how to do things like this and people who don't, and how the people who do know have an advantage in life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you expect from companies that sell kit at $50/£50/€50? You always kind of get what you pay for. If you pay an annual maintenance, then you can expect regular and secure updates, otherwise you are buying the product as is at time of purchase. Then again, I buy stuff that can be flashed with OpenWRT ...
If a car spontaneously combusts we hold the auto manufacturable liable for correcting that defect. It doesn't matter if it's a Prius or a Ferrari. These vendors are selling defective devices and it is fixable via software patch. Just because they stopped selling them doesn't mean they shouldn't have to fix it.
This is a bit of a spurious comparison. Nobody is dying from an unpatched router. Why should a company be on the hook for a device, particularly if it's out of warranty? If you expect more than that, you need to be buying something with a contract stating you're going to get more than that.
For national security sake all routers should be required to support open firmwares.
FCC requires home router manufacturers to prevent users from modifying transmit settings (primarily to prevent interference with weather systems - which 5G is also going to mess with). While the router manufacturers themselves might not provide features to modify the parameters, allowing third-party open source firmware opens them upto liability, because third-party firmware -- almost all of which are open source, can provide users with features that allow changing the transmit parameters. This is because the radio operation is controlled by the OS (most of these have linux on them), and the parameters are to be included in the same firmware blob as the OS.
FCC is not the problem here either. FCC saw the quick-fix that some manufacturers took, like TP-Link, which is to block any third-party firmware. So they required TP-Link to reverse their decision to prevent installation of third-party firmware. Then what's the solution?
The best way to prevent allowing consumers to change the transmit settings, while allowing open source firmware meant for the rest of the board (where all of the security issues arise), will require having different flash chips - one for most of the firmware, and a separate on for the storage radio parameters. This route is what Linksys is taking.
Personally, I doubt this is a good enough solution. Board designs today use a single SoC that does everything. So I'm not sure how they think storing the transmit settings on a different flash chip will prevent the firmware from using different parameters. Any design that is more complex than the two flash chip solution will require a lot of reworking of designs, because most board designs basically consist of a few components: the SoC, the flash and RAM. Nothing else.
Apart from the re-working of existing designs, there's another problem. The problem is the BOM constraints router makers face, since they are always in a race to the bottom price-wise. Adding additional chips, introduces cost and complexity, which they don't want to go through.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you expect from companies that sell kit at $50/£50/€50? You always kind of get what you pay for. If you pay an annual maintenance, then you can expect regular and secure updates, otherwise you are buying the product as is at time of purchase. Then again, I buy stuff that can be flashed with OpenWRT ...
$50 honestly seems expensive considering how long home routers have been around. It's not as if it's novel technology. I'd expect cheap mass-produced routers to be around $15 - $25, like an immersion blender.. I don't quite understand why cheap ones are still $40-$60.
What is the best wifi-router out now for home hackers? I'd like to do a pi-hole type setup but without the pi-hole and I also need a stronger wifi signal than on the box my ISP gives me.
It's times like this i'm glad my home router is a x86 mini PC running Arch Linux + iptables + Unifi (Complete with DNS MITM forcing all DNS out of my apartment over TLS)
How high-touch is this kind of setup? I have a separate access point and I am using a consumer-grade "wireless router" for DHCP. (and other things?) I'm more of an app developer that does DevOps stuff when I have to. Is this something I can get done in a day or so? Is a Raspberry Pi enough, or do I need something more powerful?