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Ask HN: What network equipment to buy to avoid backdoors?

4 pointsby srmattoalmost 2 years ago
I want to buy network equipment for my home, but I don&#x27;t want there to be existing backdoors or backdoors added later. I am concerned a company like Eero for example could be persuaded by some three letter agency to add a backdoor that can be used to snoop my network traffic. Are there good open source options?<p>I&#x27;m looking at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teklager.se&#x2F; for routers. But I can&#x27;t find any good options for wireless access points?<p>Thanks for your help!

2 comments

mydriasisalmost 2 years ago
You can get a router and install OpenWRT[0] if you&#x27;re concerned about the firmware. For commercial stuff without a custom firmware, there&#x27;s no real telling without downloading its firmware yourself and going through it, and even then in many cases you&#x27;re going to be unpacking a linux filesystem which may-or-may-not contain a backdoor in the clear. There will likely be proprietary blobs therein that you&#x27;d need to RE as well. That is a lot of effort, and that&#x27;s assuming that the blobs are even available, full images, or not encrypted, which for many manufacturers many of those conditions are not met.<p>Then, I saw a post floating around this morning where you can build your own router from scratch. Interesting proposal... I think if you want true knowledge of whether or not something is back-doored, you&#x27;ll need a lot lot lot of information on the provenance on everything in the thing :) which is a tall order.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openwrt.org&#x2F;supported_devices" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openwrt.org&#x2F;supported_devices</a>
Sunsparkalmost 2 years ago
The suggestion in the other comment about OpenWRT is the way to go, but I will also suggest you can absolutely build your own router using a PC using OpenBSD or whatever you like. That&#x27;s how it is done at scale.<p>Of course then you go down the rabbit hole of the ME&#x2F;PSP is a backdoor independent CPU and OS.. except you&#x27;re reading this on a machine using it.. so..<p>Don&#x27;t worry too much about it. OpenWRT or a PC you put together.