101–110 of 136 posts
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Last time when I looked OpenWRT was unable to support MIMO and beamforming capabilities of many of the devices it was running on. This capabilities are crucial to have decent coverage, signal strength and throughput where I live (i.e.: crowded/congested wireless networks in an apartment complex). Did OpenWRT team managed to work around them, or did the manufacturers started to play nicer with open drivers with loadab…
Some routers specifically allow openWRT.. example, Routers like the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (Flint 2) and TP-Link Archer AX6000 come with OpenWrt pre-installed and are designed for easy OpenWrt use.
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Yes, and my point is that hasn’t been the case in my experience.
It's because you (like me) aren't quite as paranoid as security people are. Personally I couldn't sleep at night if I was security people. It's really a matter of context. Security people tend to only be involved when things are already nefarious where as boring old normal people like us see get to see the mundane everyday mistakes so not just the nefarious bits.
The consistency with which networking hardware companies produce such garbage is crazy. And it’s always amateur hour backdoors somehow. If it was something sophisticated they might get a pass on „ok some security agency made them do it probably“
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At that point it’s not even a back door it’s just stupid default root password kind of design which used to be standard in this kind of hardware. Backdoor would at least try to be subtle :)
Backdoors are often (almost always?) designed to look like incompetence so that there's plausible deniability.
And if you ever looked inside the firmwares of these IoT Linux boxes (be it sip phones, payment terminals, ip cameras, routers, modems, etc.) you'd not want it anywhere near anything that needs to be secure. OpenWRT or your own thing, or very strict isolation, or nothing.
> The associated username is not validated, so any provided username will succeed when paired with the backdoor password. Great. I am really wondering why should the customers trust these manufacturers. At this point I would not use any router with vendor-provided black box firmware. Full stop. I would always install OpenWRT or something similar on it before using it. And if that is not possible for whatever reason,…
Hm, do you ever go over 1gbit? If my understanding is correct, good affordable routers like Mikrotik's CCR2004 are fully closed, so the only option is to build your own shitty box which will be much less energy efficient than their specialized switch chips.
No. None of the local ISPs offer speeds above 1 Gbps.
However, I use FriendlyElec NanoPi R5C as the main entrypoint router. It has two 2.5G ethernet ports. It costs less than 100 euros. And it runs OpenWRT.
It is not a multiport, multi-gigabit device though. And I have not tested it above 1 Gbps so I am unsure about its real world performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and my point is that hasn’t been the case in my experience.
It's because you (like me) aren't quite as paranoid as security people are. Personally I couldn't sleep at night if I was security people. It's really a matter of context. Security people tend to only be involved when things are already nefarious where as boring old normal people like us see get to see the mundane everyday mistakes so not just the nefarious bits.
It's possible the backdoor is deliberate, I have no idea in this particular case, but the more likely situation, absent more information, is that someone who is earning a middling wage just added the "feature" and didn't think about the security implications because no one cares about computer security.
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In computer security, never attribute to ignorance that which is adequately explained by malice.
You’ve got the saying backwards: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
The article doesn't disclose the value of "sys.rzadmin.password", but this writeup from 2022 does: https://boschko.ca/tenda_ac1200_router/ Spoiler: it's "rzadmin". And it looks like there are a bunch of other goodies in the firmware, too.
So in English it would be like "dcadmin". Maybe they outsourced it to someone doing "gute Deutsche Wertarbeit", or it's a leftover from some agency having had their fun, or smoke&mirrors from whomever for whichever reasons.