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Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

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Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#21

Post by danpalmer »

legalcorrection wrote: post #18
danpalmer wrote: post #2

I remember reading in the UK government's security assessment of Huawei that one of the issues is not necessarily data being sent to bad places or backdoors in the software, it's that the engineering processes behind these devices/software are completely unable to protect against any sort of supply chain attacks. The sorts of things they highlighted were: no version control, no code review, production builds happenin…

Also a perfect environment to slip in back doors that look like mistakes.

Exactly, that was their point. I suspect there are a lot of software supply chains that are actually compromised, because it's just too easy when this is the standard of software engineering.

It's easy to forget that git for example is not just a big "undo" button, it's a cryptographically secure audit log of all changes made, that allows you to know exactly what software you're actually shipping.

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#22

Post by Lifelarper »

maxloh wrote: post #6

TP Link is a Chinese company. I won't trust them personally. In China's current political status, it is impossible for Chinese companies to reject the autocratic government's requests for surveillance. You may endup in jail or even get killed.

So hypothetically as a western activist at risk of govt coercion you'd trust Cisco more?

Statistically, you very likely own a Chinese manufactured router while using it to tell others here not to do the same.

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#23

Post by inglor_cz »

cassianoleal wrote: post #13
matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

So how do we get routers that support open source firmware? It seems these things are getting more difficult to find.

The Turris routers are quite good these days. I own an Omnia and despite it having been a bit rough a few years ago, it's now nearly flawless. The MOX is modular and could be more interesting for your use-case but it can also get pretty expensive. https://www.turris.com/

Ah, a Czech product. I know some engineers from Turris. Very proud of them. This is how a good router should look like.

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#24

Post by zinekeller »

Before you say anything about this feature (which is apparently called HomeCare, https://www.tp-link.com/homecare/), you should probably know that Asus also has a AiProtection feature powered by Trend Micro (https://www.asus.com/content/aiprotection/) and D-Link having McAfee Secure Home Platform built-in (https://www.dlink.com/en/latest-news/d-link-introduces-new-e...). Definitely not vindicating TP-Link here (especially the alleged continuous querying despite the feature being off), just noting that this is not exclusive to TP-Link.

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#25

Post by Gigachad »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

So how do we get routers that support open source firmware? It seems these things are getting more difficult to find.

It’s a lost cause. The router should be treated as hostile and shouldn’t be allowed to know anything if possible. DNS over HTTPS and that SNI encryption stuff should be used.

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#26

Post by rlpb »

maxloh wrote: post #6

TP Link is a Chinese company. I won't trust them personally. In China's current political status, it is impossible for Chinese companies to reject the autocratic government's requests for surveillance. You may endup in jail or even get killed.

This is true of the US too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intell...

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#27

Post by haukem »

aaronmdjones wrote: post #5
matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

So how do we get routers that support open source firmware? It seems these things are getting more difficult to find.

The WRT1200AC family (WRT3200ACM etc) support it out of the box as a first-class feature. https://www.linksys.com/nz/wireless-routers/wrt-wireless-rou...

The WRT1200AC family is not well supported. The Ethernet part should work fine, but the Wifi is unsupported since some years now, see here the repository: https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi The vendors are not interested in this hardware any more, but they have very good marketing and sales. Linksys and Marvell also did not really support the OpenWrt community, they just had good marketing. If your WRT1200AC device does not work well with OpenWrt do not complain to OpenWrt, but complain to the Linksys support.

The WRT1200AC family for example does not support WPA3, because the closed source Wifi firmware does not support it. The 15 years old WRT54G supports WPA3, it is just very slow. ;-)

Currently I would suggest the Linksys E8450 / Belkin RT3200 (same hardware) or some other device using the current Mediatek platform with MT7622 + MT7915 + MT7531. (2 X Cortex-A53, Wifi 6) All chips are supported in recent upstream Linux kernel, including Wifi. The Mediatek router team is currently doing pretty good upstream open source work for their chips.

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#29

Post by quotha »

Gigachad wrote: post #25
matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

So how do we get routers that support open source firmware? It seems these things are getting more difficult to find.

It’s a lost cause. The router should be treated as hostile and shouldn’t be allowed to know anything if possible. DNS over HTTPS and that SNI encryption stuff should be used.

How do you plan on blocking ad servers with DoH?

Re: Newer TP-Link Routers send large volumes of requests to Avira servers

#30

Post by detaro »

kemotep wrote: post #19
detaro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it even mean for an access point to be "compatible" with a specific OS on the router?

Like the ability for the ap to understand how the vlans the router setup work. I’m still quite the network novice but it seems like if I wanted a bsd firewall -> managed switch -> wireless ap I would need to confirm some level of interoperability for decent performance?

That kind of interoperability has nothing to do with the OSes though if you straight-up configure things. VLANs are VLANs, regardless if it's Linux, Windows, BSD, Cisco, ... on the other end of the cable. (And if you expect some kind of automatic configuration sync etc the answer is in reverse "doesn't work unless you buy everything from one vendor", for that part there is little standardization)
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