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Comment by 0xfeba | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Steven Gibson. The biggest defense we can have on this is autoupdating routers. At a minimum, just restart at some fixed time after an update is downloaded. More fancy would be dynamically calculating a low usage day and time to restart.

But this would also involve the router manufacturer keeping it up-to-date as well.

Which gets me thinking... Does a SOHO (or any) device exist that effectively runs two firmware instances at once to allow minimal downtime as it switches over to new firmware? I imagine larger routers do, or at least, two identical physical routers accomplishes as much.

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You will probably need more complex hardware to accommodate this and it will be much more complex to implement correctly. For SOHO it is better to simply optimize for quicker boot process. For homes it doesn't even matter, just reboot the thing automatically on schedule during night. My expensive router does this and it is not hard or expensive to implement in all new models, regardless of their price.

Solid firmwares like OpenWRT run on a lot of routers already.

It should be possible to have some amount of regular updates, if not automatic.

Do you realize that OpenWrt is not very secure and DD-Wrt is even worse?

Yup, I do. Have used it on and off since my Wrt54gs.

My point was about availability of updates. Third partu firmwares seem to have a lot more updates than factory ones.

LEDE also merged back with OpenWRT so I hope that improves things.

Rather than poke holes, do you have any suggestions?

Have you got links or keywords I can search for details about that? (I'm in the middle of a decision about moving to an OpenWRT or Mikrotik router...)

One thing I hated about ddwrt was how hard it was to get a TLS download and/or hash. Like seriously, if I'm putting this on my router I don't want it coming down by http!

Why do you say openwrt is not secure? Just curious to learn.

So we should just stick with the inscrutable pre-installed proprietary firmware?

With a current kernel and updated userland? the no-password root ssh after flashing is vulnerable to others in your local network yes, keep it offline until pubkey-only auth is configured. To save against dropbear exploits, bind ssh to the internal-ethernet interface and if installed, access uhttpd/LuCI only via this tunnel. Other than that it seems equal to other default distribution installs. Apparmor/selinux steps up ubuntus/fedoras game yes, I don't know how much of this has been a concern yet in OpenWrt, a recent talk touches shortly on it. It seems to be a clean, easy-to-configure distribution that is alive and well after the remerge that just got a recent stable-release. Secondary vectors like package-system are a factor. But despite being reliant on the vendor, it buildable by the end-user. I applaud their efforts.

>.. Does a SOHO (or any) device exist that effectively runs two firmware instances at once to allow minimal downtime as it switches over to new firmware? I imagine larger routers do, or at least, two identical physical routers accomplishes as much.

Quite likely that google-wifi (chromeos) does, or at least is capabale of doing that given good enough hardware. All of google's products have moved to this sort of A/B layout.

If you start making my router autoupdate and autoreboot like Windows does you will alienate a very large number of customers.

Instead: stop making shit routers.

Unlike with Windows I seriously doubt that. Windows reboot is unpredictable and a) can break your work flow and b) can possible corrupt your unsaved data, calculations etc.

Router reboot is simply a network outage for 2-3 minutes and routers that can do auto-update also always support configuration it. E.g. Reboot at 3am in the night, only on Monday and only if there had been new firmware in the last week. I can assure you that it is neither disrupting nor noticeable at all. Router boots neither break work flows nor corrupt your data (in SOHO segment).

You assume updating the router firmware won't break or reset your configuration, and won't add new vulnerabilities you haven't already mitigated.

It could and likely would be configurable. The problem is the people who plug the router in with the default password and forget about it.

This would solve that while leaving it configurable for technical users.

> Does a SOHO (or any) device exist that effectively runs two firmware instances at once to allow minimal downtime as it switches over to new firmware?

There are plenty of routers that have two OS partitions so that a new version can be installed without interrupting the currently-running version, but you still need a full reboot to switch to running the new OS.

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