Recent Thoughts About The Edge of My Network
In recent weeks I’ve been accumulating some thoughts about the edge of networks, and the edge of my home office network in particular.
This all started last month where there was an Ars Technica article describing how someone found a backdoor that allowed an evil-doer to gain admin access to a common consumer combination DSL Modem/router/Wifi AP. The author initially proved the exploit by hacking his Linksys WAG200G wireless gateway.
The article describes how he published the script used to run the exploit. That allowed others to try the exploit against various makes/models of consumer hardware. It thus came to light that the same trick works against various products from Linksys and Netgear, amongst others.
One project that I’m am about to start is moving from my m0n0wall router to a new one build around pfsense. The motivation for the project is the integration of our Comcast Business Class internet service into the rest of the household. At present there are two separate networks, with only a few devices enjoying the high speed cable service. The pfsense system will be configured for dual WAN, accessing both the cable service and Covad DSL circuit.