3min chapter

Citadel Dispatch cover image

CD36: privacy focused open source routers with @jamesob and @_k3tan

Citadel Dispatch

CHAPTER

Buying a Wi-Fi Router?

There are a few products out there now that are really nice from user experience standpoint. I would recommend, you know, if you're conscious security, don't get a router where the administrative functionality is on some cloud. We have BTC pins asking if there's any open source, do it yourself, mesh Wi-Fi options. Do either of you guys have an answer to this?

00:00
Speaker 1
I know one of the ones that was mentioned was in Visibox and I went out to their website and kind of trolled around their GitHub a little bit and you know, that stuff is really, it takes a lot of time to size up if there isn't a really big community around it, if there isn't, you know, long history of the project, if there aren't a lot of eyes on the code base, you essentially have to read through everything that's in there or get some when you trust to do that and sign off on it. So yeah, it can be very difficult. I wanted to make another note though about buying your own router. There are a few products out there now that are really nice from user experience standpoint. You know, Google and Amazon both have products that are these mesh routers where you buy maybe they sell you a pack of three router nodes and you can kind of add, you know, nodes as necessary and just put them around your house. And I actually installed one of these for my mom because I thought it was, you know, simple and, you know, be easy to maintain. And I was surprised to find that the administrative software for these routers is a cloud hosted product, you know, from one of these companies. And so, you know, you have a mobile app on your phone that allows you to do the administrative stuff instead of being hosted just on the router itself. And that to me is a pretty big red flag. So I would recommend, you know, if you're thinking about this kind of thing, if you're conscious security, don't get a router where the administrative functionality is on some cloud. So be careful of that. Katan,
Speaker 5
you have
Speaker 2
something to add here?
Speaker 3
Not that that I think that sums it
Speaker 2
up. I think in general, like all of those like mesh systems, like the out of the box mesh systems tend to,
Speaker 1
they're
Speaker 2
all pretty much proprietary. And they all basically on the like, we talk about it a lot on dispatch, this idea of convenience versus privacy and security trade off. They tend to go more towards the convenience side, which is unfortunate because in theory, it's a really cool concept that you can just buy like a package of five devices and put them all around your house and have and have Wi-Fi wherever you need it with little administration. But your trade off there is usually security and privacy. We have BTC pins asking if there's any open source, do it yourself, mesh Wi-Fi
Speaker 1
options. This
Speaker 2
is a question that I've wondered myself that I do not have an answer to. Do either of you guys have an answer to this?

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