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

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 happening on arbitrary machines, no automated testing, poor access control on code, no audit trail on code changes, the list goes on, and that's just for the software side. The conclusion was that Huawei were about a decade away from being able to even claim they had no backdoors. And that's a major telecoms hardware provider, trying to sell into governments and major infrastructure projects.

I'm not in the least bit surprised that TP-Link are doing this, and also not at all surprised that when questioned on it they are (so far) unable to actually describe why it's happening or really seem to know anything about it.

I think this sort of product is built in a very different environment to what most HN users would expect.

The software answer would be easy: use OpenWRT or any other *BSD based alternative, but what about the hardware? A quick search for WAN interfaces for PCs returned nothing.

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.

That's before installing OpenWRT!

This kind of shenanigans make (once again) the case for 3rd party post market FLOSS firmware to be installed on every device I own. Sure, I spend some extra time researching which router/AP/phone/ereader/smart appliance will be compatible with OpenWRT/LineageOS/KOReader/Tasmota/ESPHome/etc., but I feel more confortable this way. I have more trust in a bunch of people doing this for owning their devices than some corporation whose goals clearly don't align with mine.

I would agree that it can be difficult to find quality hardware that supports the open source software stack.

For example, what wireless access points are compatible with an openbsd router/firewall? I’ll admit that my initial searches were short but only finding results about wireless chipsets to use in the router were frustrating (I guess if I wanted to build my own access points that information would be valuable).