I haven't played with it much, but there are ways to persist after a reset on Android, I'd assume the same is possible here. Very happy to be corrected.
Anyone know what the cheapest Linksys I could buy is, and whether these vulnerabilities have been released publicly?
To be clear, the main "vulnerability" is just ability to get physical access and re-flash the devices with a custom firmware which allows the access to the target network. The best defense would be locking down the router physically and setting a strong password for the admin portal.
There were no vulnerabilities included in the cherryblossom leak. The firmware implant deployment instructions included in the leak don't mention using any vulnerabilities either.
Almost all of the devices listed in the cherryblossom leak are not being sold anymore.
Another option is to setup a vpn server that all your devices connect to to access the internet. In that scenario it won't matter if your router is compromised because all traffic flowing through would be encrypted.
Nevermind the community, when it comes to vaguely complex things like IPTV and similar, support is either legacy or gone.
At this point OpenWRT is the only sane choice, at least it doesn't run everything as root and isn't going to shove off Multicast UDP packet forwarding support in the next year or two.
Probably your cheapest bet on the supported device list (ca. p27 of the PDF on Wikileaks) would be a WRT54G v5. The GL models have some support as well, but last I checked they had a relatively high used value, presumably for their hackability - the G models are much more limited.