Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
If I was in charge over at TP-Link, getting news that tens of thousands of MY company's routers were compromised would have me furious! I'd be freaking out, making sure that we take immediate steps to improve software/firmware quality and to make sure we're in a constant state of trying to compromise our own hardware... To ensure no one else finds vulnerabilities before we do.
Instead, TP-Link seems to have just laughed and focused strictly on profit margins.
This whole thing is reminiscent of the TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi - "But, I'm Singaporean, Senator".
I don’t know whether it’s worth banning them or not, but putting your hands up and saying “what Chinese company?” is just absurd.
2. As you admitted, they have completely separated into 2 separate companies, claiming that it is still Chinese is akin to saying "tea is Chinese", that's completely absurd, yes, it was at some point in history, that point is not now.
Did you not read the article? It's hard to take your comment in good faith if you didn't.
Except they didn't do that. They moved the HQ.
I'll accept for the purpose of this argument that they fully split the company into two separate companies. But both of those companies are still mostly Chinese, going by the numbers in this thread.
> Did you not read the article? It's hard to take your comment in good faith if you didn't.
This is a weak attempt at turnabout. The article doesn't present any evidence of separation or non-Chinese-ness, it just quotes the company (and even that quote admits a bunch of Chinese assets). But even if it did, it wouldn't be bad faith to skip reading it.
1. Who else would document a company's restructure if not the company itself?
2. Yes, not reading an article and commenting on it is bad faith.
> going by the numbers in this thread.
3. So you have no evidence of it not being as the company says, just the vibes of others on this thread, okay Senator.
If the company wants to give numbers, I'll listen to them. But the company made vague/unproven claims and that's not enough. Journalists can investigate.
> 2. Yes, not reading an article and commenting on it is bad faith.
Commenting on something talked about in the article doesn't require reading that specific article. You can use other sources.
> 3. So you have no evidence of it not being as the company says, just the vibes of others on this thread, okay Senator.
Other people brought objective numbers. Not vibes.
Why should I not use those numbers? You have not claimed any of those numbers are wrong, you're just calling people's conclusions wrong.
The reality is the only part that matters, the chipsets, are produced in Chinese factories owned by TPLink.
They moved everything that doesn’t matter to the US recently in an effort to give the illusion that they aren’t putting chips manufactured under the control of the Chinese government into the majority of routers used in the US.
I’m not agreeing with banning them, but I can certainly see how it creates significant risks that I would want to mitigate somehow.
So are more than half the chipsets in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microprocessors_made_...
I agree with you that they shouldn't be banned, but the US casting aspersions against another country is pretty rich considering the involvement of the CIA, and NSA around the world.
“in October 2024, established TP-Link Systems Inc., based in Irvine, CA, as its global headquarters and parent company with Jeffrey (Jianjun) Chao and his wife Hillary as sole owners. Jeffrey is CEO of the company.”
https://www.tp-link.com/us/landing/fact-sheet/
2. The sole owners are Chinese citizens, 95% of their employees are Chinese citizens living in China, most of the R&D happens in china, and the majority of the components of their products are manufactured in China.
They have an HQ building in the US, but 90% of it is leased to other companies.
This is a US based company in name only. It’s essentially a shell company designed to bypass a potential US ban.
From your linked fact sheet.
"TP-Link is a Chinese company that manufactures network equipment and smart home products. The company was established in 1996 in Shenzhen. TP-Link's main headquarters is located in Nanshan, Shenzhen; there is a smaller headquarters in Irvine, California"
That is like people saying Nothing is a UK company, when all I see is a Chinese company registered in UK.
Everything that is happening with this administration is simply because it suits American foreign policy or the interests of one of the oligarchs. I mean this with absolutely no hyperbole: the pretense of there being any rule of law for the ultra-wealthy is gone. The White House is openly selling pardons, which have the added effect of cancelling out debts to the US government.
Tiktok getting banned? It had nothing to do with "national security". The government simply had less control over the content and the algorithm on Tiktok than they do on Meta and Google platforms.
Reading through this article, you have Microsoft pointing the finger at TP-Link. That's... rich. Becvause Microsoft has historically been horrible for security. It would take further investigation but I really wonder if TP-Link isn't just a convenient scapegoat.
Real reform here would be something like prohibiting tying software and hardware together as one product, source code escrow, etc. Things that actually create security and consumer choice, rather than merely one less vendor to pick from.
Pardons are not being openly sold. There is absolutely not great stuff going on with them but, really, the major difference I see is that it's happening during the administration, rather than in the last few hours.
The US is moving the wrong direction when it comes to corruption but let's not act like we're bottom of the barrel ir that this slide just started in 2024 (or 2016, if you'd like).
Did I read the last sentence correctly?
Since he's in the news and it's on my mind, I'm not sure the Cheney and the whole Iraq/Haliburton situation has been topped since then. Then there's ever member of Congress suddenly becoming a multimillionaire after they get into office.
The only norm Trump is breaking is that he doesn't care to sweep it under the rug
Now this sort of thing isn't new. Famously on Clinton's last day in office he pardoned Marc Rich [4], who was convicted (before fleeing the country) on breaking sanctions by trading with Iran. It was widely rumored his ex-wife, Denise Rich, who had a lot of access to the Clinton's brokered a deal.
But what changed is the disastrous Trump v. United STates [5] decision last year that granted almost absolute presidential immunity. Now there's not the slightest fear of repercussions so the whole operation has gone into overdrive and it's so incredibly brazen.
I stand by my original claim: the TP-Link ban isn't technical. It's political. And I would bet all th emoney in my pockets that if the CEO had "donated" $1 million to the inauguration (like all the Tech CEOs did including Bezos and Cook) we'd likely have a very different outcome.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/8/fact-checking-claims...
[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-pardons-...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-convicted-bin...
[4]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/clintons-pardon-of-marc-ri...
That really has nothing to do with it. The pardon power and it's discretion is well established to rest solely in the hands of the President. There can be no consequences for pardons otherwise, the Clinton things you mention would have led to something.
As far a fines go, if the 2B savings under DOGE was nothing, 1B of lost fines (which would probably have never been collected anyway due to negligence or bankruptcy) is nothing as well.
https://labs.watchtowr.com/get-fortirekt-i-am-the-super_admi...
And to be clear, let's not forget that the US government did intentionally and secretly conduct surreptitious biological warfare tests against entire US cities that deliberately inflicted disease upon and killed American citizens. There was an entire formal program that spanned decades - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo...
Of course, the US government doesn't have any secret programs anymore and never lies to us, so everyone can rest easy knowing nothing like this could ever happen again.
This might be one of the only cases where subscription model would work well to cover the maintenance cost.
1) Company takes your subscription money.
2) Company finds a vulnerability that's difficult to fix.
3) Company announces your device is EOL and ends your subscription, taking your money for doing nothing, and not helping when you need it.
Almost all software everywhere comes with a 'no liability' clause. And arguable, open source couldn't exist without it.
The exceptions where liability is wanted negotiate that specifically.
We protect people because they have failed. These regulations tend to follow actual injuries; they are rarely promulgated in anticipation of them.
You don't negotiate the contents of your burger with McDonald's. If you don't like it, you go to Burger King or have a Döner Kebab.
There's plenty of tacit negotiations here.
> We protect people because they have failed. These regulations tend to follow actual injuries; they are rarely promulgated in anticipation of them.
Homeopathic medicine tend to follow actual health problems, too. That doesn't mean they are a good idea.
Not every industry is a competitive one with practically unlimited choices. Natural monopolies or industries with high barriers to entry tend to have the most leverage over their customers. Most people have only a single electricity provider, and there are only two major mobile OS vendors worth speaking of.
> Homeopathic medicine tend to follow actual health problems, too. That doesn't mean they are a good idea.
Some work; some don’t. The key is figuring out which solutions are effective and which aren’t. Nobody is proposing keeping fixes around whose costs aren’t worth the benefits to society.
Couldn't you just include selling a product or a licence for it as a requirement?
Generally most GPL'd software isn't sold (terms and conditions may apply).
Pretty well, actually, as long as you can download the software for free.
The only industry with a broad "no liability for torts" is gun manufacturing.
Or -hear me out on this one, it is wild take- if you come out with a device, system or software that has fundamental flaws, you fix them at your own cost or get fined to oblivion if you don't.
If a company is not able to come up with reliable, quality products, then perhaps it shouldn't be in the business of creating said products to start with.
The fact that you suggest subscriptions to fix fundamental issues is a good reflection of how companies have managed to skew the general perception on what is "acceptable" as a product. In fact, they have pushed it so far, that they are feeding it to us backwards.
Pushing out minimal viable products and have subscribers pay to (perhaps, one day) get something that works shouldn't be the norm.
A car info/entertainment system that is too slow and buggy because the manufacturer couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to make sure it worked reliably? -> fix it
A phone manufacturer that throttles your system after a year because they couldn't be arsed to properly size their batteries originally? -> fix it
A router manufacturer shipping software so buggy their hardware needs to be rebooted periodically? -> fix it
Etc.
"Software is hard" or "product design is hard" are no excuses. Building airplanes that don't fall out of the sky is also hard, and yet we manage to do so. (Or, rather ironically, the ones that follow the "minimal viable product" software mentality do fall out of the sky. Looking at you, Boeing).
I was so used to this that when I started looking for this setting in UniFi OS I had forgotten the part 'networks are not supposed to be rebooted frequently!'.
First, all of the TP-Link devices I use still have firmware updates regularly. I can't talk about Deco series, which I don't own.
Second, mesh capabilities are not consistent across different brands, that's true. On the other hand, comparing TP-Link, which is a home/SOHO brand to UniFi, which is essentially a prosumer/enterprise offering is not fair. I have a small mesh (three devices) at one of the places I run these devices, and it hands-off nicely, extends coverage, and gives me the speeds written on the tin.
Do I expect it to compare to a UniFi or Aruba mesh where the smallest element has more processing power than my router? Of course not. Do I expect it to run on a 300 sqm house with 10+ devices? Again, no. But as long as my network runs, I can access the devices with good connections and speeds they advertise, I'm golden.
Lastly, "restart everyday at this time" setting is present since forever on many devices. The feature is to help home-downloaders / data hoarders to renew their IP periodically. Heck, even JDownloader has a feature to reset your modem remotely if your modem supports to renew IPs (since 2004?). Assumptions don't help here.
I never had to automatically restart any of the routers/modems I used regardless of the manufacturer sans a couple Cisco/Linksys devices. E4200 which had two processors, one for the switch and one for the router. The router one stopped responding randomly to cut whole network off from internet, and my E900's processor crashed flooding whole home network with packets basically paralyzing it. Oh, that same E900 failed to negotiate with the on board RTL8139 Ethernet controller, so I had to buy another "Cisco/Linksys" RTL8139 card.
TP-Links I had never done anything remote. They even have the best latencies and WAN recovery when things go south on ISP side. My TP-Link 802.11AX extender works flawlessly with my ISP supplied WiFi6 modem, and despite having no mesh communication going on, running on the same SSID and handing off pretty reliably.
People can dedicate a small cabinet to UniFi rack-mountable gear plus the network center of their house. TP-Link has none of those, and not aiming for that market, even.
It's comparing a Peugeot 3008 with a Mercedes-Benz G Class and adding that, Mercedes has serious off-road trucks like Unimog, but G Class is their end-user product.
Apples to Pineapples.
BTW, it's not hard for me to install and manage a high capacity UniFi network in any way. I don't use their devices, because I don't want to manage yet another network.
From my experience, TP-Link makes hardware changes with "H/W versioning" in their model numbers. I have many RE220 extenders with different hardware revisions, earlier ones doesn't supporting OneMesh. However, I don't find later versions performing worse w.r.t. earlier ones.
However, $500/unit, the backbone of the devices doesn't look underpowered, esp. when looking to both wireless and wired specs. Considering my RE700X is saying what's written on the tin, and being rock-solid despite working with a non TP-link device and and being behind two 30cm walls.
I expect these Deco devices to live up to their specs.
Not convinced that’s “home” or “soho”, unless you have a very generous meaning of “small” which leaves the 5 person office somewhat undefined.
Even our largest buildings at of multi billion dollar revenue company only get upto 2500 wifi devices.
My Deco M4 mesh units from 2019 are still receiving regular firmware updates (to be fair, I think more to bring compatibility with new features than for security updates, but regardless).
Yet we all know so many industries and products that just do not work like that and in fact the longer something is broken and it doesn’t seem to stop people from using it, the more it is accepted that it is ok for it to remain broken. I think that is somehow just a part of human psychology.
No single person created the traffic jam "bug", the "users" are the biggest part. In many industries "the fix" isn't a few lines of code that you can one-click push to all users. You can't fix that traffic jam in code or even in infrastructure, you need to change society itself on top of everything else. It may not even be a defect as much as a supply and demand issue where supply is very scarce and impossible to ramp up, while demand is super high and growing. Cloud providers run out of capacity in some regions, their developers should be ashamed?
Software can be fixed quickly if broken. Capacity not so much. Software is also routinely launched broken, and subsequently stays in various degrees of broken or not usable enough throughout its lifecycle, with new and unpredictable issues replacing old ones.
If too many people wanting to drive a car in the same place, at the same time despite the predictable outcome due to the limited capacity is purely a failure of the city, country, road builder, then isn't a user not being able or not knowing how to properly use the software the fault of the developer? Is demanding more from the software than it can deliver the fault of the developer? How much cumulated time does this cost, sometimes for absolutely no reason whatsoever than an arbitrary decision of the developer?
You aren't "deeply ashamed" because you downplay the issues you (or your company) create as a developer and pretend they aren't problems for the users. A "part of human psychology" tells you 1000 smaller cuts are fine.
You were talking about reasons to be ashamed? How about that as a developer you don't understand system design and capacity/performance limits, and you don't understand that intentionally loading a system beyond its rated capacity is not the problem of the system. Even an LLM knows that.
I bet you only build systems with infinite capacity and performance.
Imagine if we did not have congestion control in TCP and instead every time we got congestion we just upped the bandwidth. Do you think at some point our ability to increase capacity would outpace the demand for what is for the most part a free resource (I know neither roads nor network badwidth are free but the cost is amortized such that it “feels” free to the users)? Or do you think demand would grow as fast or faster than capacity?
The real answer is to reduce demand. You can do this by introducing something like congestion pricing: make it expensive to use the resource when demand is close to capacity. Or you add some form of congestion control. For example you could dynamically set speed limits on secondary roads and when the freeway traffic flow slows down you slow down cars as they try to get to the on ramp of the freeway. Or you could raise the price of gas by $1/gallon to discourage car use and use the revenue to build more public transit. You could charge single person car use fees. You could keep roads free but make parking downtown extremely expensive and use the proceeds to build more public transit. You could reduce speed limits in the cities to no more than 10 miles per hour and strictly enforce that; obviously this only works if you have much faster and higher speed public transit: imagine choosing between buying a car, car insurance, gas, and still taking 3x as long to get to where you want to go compared to buying a $50-100 monthly pass and using public transit.
The hubris of the spotless software engineer mind.
We have a solution for the traffic problem but you won't like it.
There is no "traffic".
YOU ARE THE TRAFFIC.
Cars and roads for cars don't scale well past very rural or very small suburban areas.
The solution to traffic is extremely hard and it involves:
* you and lots of other drivers voting to allow densification of highly serviced areas (close to central business districts, public transportation, hospitals, schools, ...) - at least mid rise apartment buildings, 4-6 stories high
* you and lots of other drivers voting to allow funding of public transit
* you and lots of other drivers voting to allow funding of reduction of car infrastructure (fewer car lanes, fewer parking spots, fewer highways, fewer car only bridges, tunnels, etc)
* you and lots of other drivers voting to allow funding of safe bike infrastructure
* you and lots of other drivers voting to allow congestion pricing in ... congested places
* you and lots of other drivers voting to allow funding for anti bike theft measures (police training, bike theft prioritization, bike serial number databases, ...)
* you and lots of other drivers taking public transit
* you and lots of other drivers riding bikes for medium length trips
* you and lots of other drivers walking for short trips
Truck deliveries can happen 3am to 6am every Tuesday and Thursday, or by paying $1,000/day toll fee.
Yes it is radical and yes people would get used to it and think it is superior after a time.
It is sometimes better to not ship a product at all instead of shipping a completely and fundamentally broken product.
cough Microsoft, Google, Apple cough
Why? Microsoft and Cisco also skimp on security.
Wait, what? TP-link provides security updates for about as long as their competitors - including providing security patches for devices that are officially out of their support window.
For example, last year they provided a critical security patch for a number of out-of-support routers, including the 14-year-old TL-WR841ND [1].
Between my house, my parents' house and my girlfriend's parents' house, I have set up 4 different types of TP-Link routers. To my surprise, all of them continue to receive firmware updates years after launch. Most recently last month on some models.
I don't get the hate. They're cheap, they work and they have SOME security features which make them more than adequate for home use.
They're not perfect, but then again, for the price point, what do people expect?
If you just need a basic ass device for simple non-critical shit without a bunch of proprietary bullshit and dark patterns, it's hard to beat TPLink for the money.
The fact that they still get support/updates long passed the typical lifespan of competing devices several times their price point is just icing on the cake.
fuk no
their spec is overbloated SHT.
I've never seen a router crawl like 300kbps on a 1.2gbps line (simply changing that to a no-named cheap generic one got me 880mbps)
fck I don't even care about backdoors -- even if you put them, just fking at least make them up-to-spec
We can do it, but we shouldn’t expose ourselves for the possibility of our opponents doing it. That simple
I'm neither from US nor from China, so I don't belong to either "we". So in my case no hardware is safer unless I design the board and develop the firmware on top of it.
Even then, I'm not sure whether there are hardware vulnerabilities baked in.
War and spying has been a thing for a long time now. I think it’s unreasonable to expect countries to not make use of their respective industries and enterprises to get an edge on each other.
The fact is that this kind of hardware is just very good for that so as I a costumer, I feel you and I think the best we can do is buy a custom hardware and install a custom OS. Like open-wrt.
But I will not complain of my country doing that because when I see adversaries doing it, it’s completely reasonable that it also do. In fact, game theory, mandates it.
I live in a country which has been spied on for years by its closest "ally". See Crypto AG scandal for more details. So in my case there's no "we".
Yeah, the most realistic trade-off might be installing OpenWRT and some tripwires to see whether anyone is trying to do something nefarious remotely.
In spying, there's no "we".
Sometimes your own government is the most likely to spy on you.
> Yeah, the most realistic trade-off might be installing OpenWRT and some tripwires to see whether anyone is trying to do something nefarious remotely.
I agree with that, but its beyond the reach of most people.
I think zero trust or low trust within your LAN is also a good idea. So is firewalling ISP supplied routers.
Definitely.
because in some parts of the world like middle east,south american,africa etc
the US is deemed more evil than china etc
Allies to spy on each other, but they are not a threat in the way actual or potential enemies are. The fact the the US spied on Germany, and Britain spied on Belgium does not really make them threats.
lol, US didnt just doing only "Spy", read the comment tree first
Russia, yes.
I do not see any real expectation of Europe not being reliant on the US. See the many discussion here about reliance on US cloud services. Where else are these natural resources to come from? Where is the technology or the money to scale up to what the US has?
2. Internally.
USian hubris won't end well for the US.
Sure, China will probably also spy and conduct industrial espionage, just as the US, but they appear to be a rational actor and have never threatened the sovereignty of European countries.
if you don't do anything wrong, you won't get into trouble, and out of 8 billion people in the world, only a handful of people get in trouble. the problem is, the definition of trouble can change.
Unless you run purely open source, your only choice always has been which country had open slather to spy on you. There are no real contenders for open source phones right now, so for most of us guaranteed privacy was never a choice. (I have high hopes for Halium in the future, as I hate this.)
For those of us in East Asia or some country like Iran or Venezuela that the US likes to bomb periodically, China is the least objectionable spy master. Those of us in the West chose USA, as they were a reliable trusted ally. Then Trump arrived on the scene and make things complicated.
(I use mainly Mikrotik at home, but my only AP currently is a TP-link 'extender' (it's 'extending' via ethernet, and the only AP doing so), it's ok.)
Kind of like Anker in batteries and earphones: maybe at some point it was the 'dodgy Chinese brand', but now a solid contender/front-running third-party.
I don't if there's any connection (no pun intended) but in my head TP-Link kind of took over from D-Link at some point as a sort of low-end-Netgear/Asus competitor.
The performance of my network immediately jumped up.
The D-Link might have a hardware issue (but it’s not worth trying to get them to address it, as it’s intermittent by weeks, and they’ll just gaslight me, if I try), or it could just be crap firmware. A lot of hardware companies treat their firmware teams like shit.
Doesn’t matter. I’m avoiding their routers, in the future. I have had good luck with their switches, though.
However, as far as I'm aware none of that has been found yet. And since multiple countries have state-level and state-funded hackers / IT security experts who have the time, budget, and capability to completely dismantle and disassemble these devices (plus enthousiastic hobbyists), you'd think they would have found concrete evidence already. If there was any.
I have faith in "our" capacity to uncover backdoors.
I have respect for human creativity, and the limits of public servants. Its not easy to keep constant vigilance against all possible backdoors. Easier to restrict core infra devices from openly hostile areas.
Glibness aside, there's clearly a continuum to the concept of 'we live in a society', and to how far the monkey brain's tribe extends. But the argument against routers is clearly arising from a biased set of priors, whether fairly or unfairly.
Food doesn’t have the incentives here, and because the FDA is involved with food production they regularly discovers issues and issues recalls etc. Even better manufactures can no longer influence food after it enters a distribution center limiting their ability to hide issues.
Now suppose you deploy a home router with automatic updates, that’s not necessarily malicious but means the device can be under the manufacturer’s control whenever they wish. Saying we haven’t discovered malicious activity is therefore meaningless here.
This could range from plausible deniability stuff (like the examples in the article), to targeted investigations / attacks (Bob who works at the Gov Accounting office for Miliary Spending), all the way to a 100-million unit botnet turning to provide a few days of distraction ("Bad hackers compromised our OTA system. Sorry!") on while a certain island is being eminant-domained.
Your food example is not the same. You can't trojan-horse an apple pie, or target an individual customer from the supplier-side (yet). If you decided to poison them, that's pulling the pin from the grenade right now.
The Chinese, regardless of how you feel about them, are great at making cheap shit that mostly works.
Very similar to how Microsoft gives the same info about 0days to the NSA to use for the same exact reason.
I think if we are there, then we should assume all 0days are known by various states before patches are available regardless of whether companies are setup to share that information or not. You don't need to get the company to share that information, just one person in a company, and I don't really see that as being a challenging task for a state to do.
Assuming otherwise seems more risky.
You should absolutely assume breach as part of your company's security policy/trust model.
Are they the next biggest vendor after Huawei?
Which is real rich coming from the US after the Snowden leaks showed Cisco was willingly cooperating with the NSA and planting NSA backdoors in their hardware destined for overseas.
Them wanting to ban TP-Link (and Huawei) have nothing to do with cybersecurity and more to do with "We don't want to allow anyone else to play the same game we are playing."
If the only issue at hand was indeed security vulnerabilities, then I can see many ways that can constructively address that (e.g. Since a large number of SKUs deployed in the US are managed by the Telcos, then force them to finance the support for continued firmware updates).
The US will probably be collecting the reciprocity of their actions, and they won't like it ... It's a very childish game they're playing and it will hurt them in 15 years time ...
Yes, it’s the US government. Of course it thinks advancing US gov controlled technology is good and CCP influence in the US is bad. That’s a completely rational stance and it’s not even hypocritical until the CCP bans some US product and the US gov complains.
It's not even hypocritical then. Both sides are protecting their own interests. These interests are partly at odds to each other. They're going to do what they believe is necessary, even if it "seems" hypocritical. That's not a bad thing, that's just ... how things work. China isn't innocent of this either. It's so weird how people are always painting this as "US bad".
Except US was all about Capitalism and they have now turned back and embraced Socialism except its socialism for losses and should be paid by the tax payer.
There's also a difference between owning some shares, which is hands off, and having no legal blocks to killing the CEO's family if he doesn't do as wished.
You're comparing false equivalences.
Chinese ownership of corporations is entirely different in this context. Even with the current US leadership, no comparison. None.
There is no difference. The US does not effectively have any law or checks on the power of the presidency at this point. Various tech companies had executives literally enlisted in the armed forces. The government has shown, repeatedly, that it will financially penalize any company that doesn't serve their agenda. It has controlled broadcasters and social media and financial organizations.
As an outsider looking in, any difference between the US and China is mostly illusory. It has all been revealed to be make believe.
Do you really not think the current President wouldn't lean as hard on a US corporation as he needed to in order to get whatever he wanted?
I remember everyone fear-mongering because some business member in China had ties with the Communist party. The US is literally commissioning executives from tech companies in the armed forces (https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/1255164460/1a-army-07-03-2025), business leaders like Elon Musk literally became members of the administration while many more (Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, among many others) are defacto mouthpieces of this administration. Trump is exerting absolute, unchecked, utterly lawless power to do whatever he wants whenever he wants, while occasionally looting those very companies for various kickbacks.
The US is currently an international shame, and a shame to 240+ years of its history. It is an abomination compared to all of its historic values and laws and checks. And anyone blind to this, yet still pointing at China, is intellectually defective.
Of course both governments utilize all measures they can to collect intelligence.
And then decide how much of that data they share with partners, and when. This has considerable security implications.
Yes.
For America, yes. For China, no.
> but any involvement from the CCP in any form in any company is Not Good ?
For America, yes. For China, no.
This isn't a case where the "principled high road" has any practical meaning. This is a "You want your side to win but you want their side to lose? You're a hypocrite!" situation.
So the 90s vibe you speak of was in fact America imposing a global hegemonic order which was calculated to benifit, if not American interests, then certainly the interests of the western oligarchs who were aligned with America.
I installed their mesh Wi-Fi system for my parents recently and was really impressed how seamless the process was. It did involve making a cloud account which I wasn’t thrilled about, however.
I bought a cellphone from them many years ago and they never really supported it and I couldn't even buy a replacement battery.
Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory.
These events left a bad impression, but they do make affordable stuff with reasonable quality.
This also happened many years ago with Linksys (prior to Cisco). It’s not that uncommon for manufacturers to release new revisions of hardware without necessarily making it clear to the purchaser. If their purpose is to deliver a router and they can shave a few cents off the BOM with less RAM, but it still works with their software, why would they care. And once new revisions have been released into the supply chain, it can be hard to know exactly what version you are buying.
In the Linksys case, IIRC they eventually re-released the first revision WRT54G as the WRT54GL (for Linux), so that people who wanted different firmware could get the exact hardware they wanted.
We see this all the time with SSDs, where a high-spec model is released to reviewers, then a low-spec model is mass-produced and sold under the same model number. That's fraud, isn't it? Shouldn't it be?
In my experience, TP-Link always has the hardware revision on a label on the outside of the box.
This is even a common product development strategy: ship to market asap, optimize the margins later.
I want the most important performance characteristics that would be on a good datasheet to be maintained, even if there is no datasheet.
I'm getting ready to set a mesh network for my older parents as well. Do you have any suggestions for hardware and software? I live a ways away from them so I need this to be pretty much faultless. I don't want to drive 4 hours for IT support.
Both might be fundamentally evil or being, but they aren't different in danger based solely on how white they are.
And yes an American company in cahoots with the government having the ability to snoop on traffic and turn entire networks off, while bad, is nowhere near as bad as a Chinese one having the exact same capability.
Obviously this particular one isn't in non-Intel equipment, but...
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq4019-adding-support-for-tp-li...
All modern WiFi APs require closed firmware blobs that run below or parallel to OpenWRT.
You replacing the router OS with OpenWRT does nothing when the radio has full DMA access and runs its own OS on its own processor. The OpenWRT layer will have no idea what it's running/infiltrating/exfiltrating.
I say this as someone who has been running and building OpenWRT forever. It's great but it isn't a panacea.
If it dies tomorrow, what’s next, out of curiosity?
One of my 2 pcengines APUs has developed an issue with its solder joints I suspect. It hangs at the bootloader unless the unit is already warm. Can't complain at all, it lasted ages and problems like this are just life for things that thermally cycle, it was in a pretty extreme climate for most of its life. Doesn't help with me needing a replacement now pcengines is out of business though, hence getting a protectli box.
This is the route I went. After a decade plus of shite consumer routers and finally an EdgeRouter which died (along with Ubiquiti's quality) I bought a Protectli box, build and flashed Coreboot and run OPNSense.
It's been going strong with regular updates (and by regular I mean as regular as your Linux workstation) for over half a decade now.
It wasn't cheap, somewhere in the region of £700 after adding SSD and RAM but it's a way, way overkill model and never exceeds 10% RAM usage and 15% CPU with an IDS running and a bunch of VLANs and Gigabit symmetric WAN.
My original goal for overspeccing it was longevity, but I regret it now, I want to upgrade to 10G+ networking and I can't justify replacing it when it runs so well and wasn't cheap.
For now, at least.
If it isnt AIDS then it is certainly a Cancer.
The radio sounds much like Intel's ME.
I think we all know there's a problem, but we don't have the power to do anything about it because what alternative is there? Ancient hardware?
A more serious problem is caused by the laptops having Intel WiFi, which is difficult to replace. With such a laptop one would have to disconnect the internal antennas and use an external WiFi dongle, to be sure that remote control is not possible.
I don’t know how much I trust TP Link, but my risk level is very low. There’s not much an attacker could do if they get on my network. None of my data is accessible on that network and everything important has MFA anyway. The most sensitive things are my POS and menu displays and they are just client devices connecting to the internet. I probably wouldn’t run this stuff in an environment where I had complex security requirements.
[0] https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/Cisc...
Some of these bans are a matter of political operatives stoking vague fears for personal or ideological gain. That was almost certainly the story about the TikTok ban. And some of it is actual intel that will get declassified in 50 years. That may be the story behind Huawei.
Given that this administration likes to use the threat of bans and tariffs pretty liberally, it's probably the former, but look at it this way: the US govt is known to have shipped backdoored networked hardware to overseas customers they wanted to snoop on. In China, the govt is more authoritarian and more integrated in the industrial supply chain; I'm sure they do that shit too, because why wouldn't they.
Gonna need a citation on that one
At one point, the TikTok ban polled at 50%. "Certainly" couldn't be further from the truth.
The company's issue is not its country of origin, but its history of installing backdoors and its public declaration to abandon fixing security flaws for numerous devices still in use.
The issue started to be pointed out by numerous independent tech news outlets and communities far more than a year ago. Do you have a basis to argue otherwise?
If TP-Link is known to have intentionally installed backdoors in its products, that is news to me. Can you provide a source for that claim?
Vulnerabilities have been found, of course, but that is hardly unique to TP-Link, and the existence of a vulnerability does not imply that it was put there intentionally.
> its public declaration to abandon fixing security flaws for numerous devices still in use
I have several machines that are still running Windows 10 and are (according to the Windows software) not eligible to upgrade to Windows 11, let alone for free. The Microsoft software informs me that I will no longer receive security updates on these machines.
When will the US government ban Microsoft products from sale in the US?
---
Still, I have much more context on the DJI ban. The law that will place DJI on the FCC's "covered list" states that if DJI is not audited by a (unspecified) US government agency, DJI products will be placed on the covered list and so be ineligible for FCC certification starting (IIRC) Jan 1 2026. In other words, the law was cleverly written such that nobody actually needs to do an audit to determine what nasty things DJI is actually getting up to; if nobody raises their hand, the ban will happen automatically.
---
Do not take me for an enthusiastic supporter of DJI, TP-Link, other Chinese companies, or the way America's political and business leaders have generally pissed away our technological advantage over China in the name of enriching themselves in the present (now past). I am, in fact, livid. But we will not dig ourselves out of this hole by becoming a backwater where Americans' relationship with consumer technology is as if they are living in a sanctioned country.
If TP-Link gets banned, my concern is what that means for the massive market share in the US. Warranty? Software updates? Or maybe that action is what turns them into an agent of the state. Or do you horde all the hardware until its valuable like DJI parts are today?
What is your evidence that the US government was paid any money as part of that deal (over and above any taxes that would have been incurred by any sale of any business).
I'm sure money also went to Chinese owners.
If only! Unfortunately it's whatever makes the Party leadership the most money.
I recently bought a TP-Link Omada ceiling mountable access point, which has been working great. My Ubiqiti APs are due for an upgrade and the Omada (for a separate network), at half the price of roughly equivalent Ubiqiti APs, is impressing me so far.
(The Ubiqiti's have been rock solid for years though, no complaints whoatsoever).
Netgear (US) and D-Link (Taiwan) were consistently disappointmenting enough that I swore off them many years ago, and buyers-remorse-PTSD prevents me from reconsidering them ever again.
I only just logged in to the controller interface yesterday again after probably six months or so, when I was checking in to see if there were firmware updates. Once it's setup there's very little maintenance, but the initial setup can be intimidating.
My country (Australia) tried to legislate in 2016 that no one is allowed to use encryption, and if they were required to, for other obvious reasons like for medical data, then they were required to code in a back-door for law enforcement.
The above is just the announcement and doesn't include answering media questions wherein we would have heard dear Malcolm's famous quote:
“Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia"
Very quiet audio of the last half of the above quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g
Political understanding of mathematics and encryption has not progressed in the intervening 9 years, much the same as the thirty years prior. Regulating internet security is forming a similarly unfortunate trajectory.
TP-Link may be sore for getting singled out but they are certainly not unique.
If TP-Link is pathologically creating unsecure products -- through incorporation of enemy government backdoors or through other improperly handled security vulnerabilities, they deserve to be singled out as making the problem worse and imposing potentially wild cost of risk-mitigation on others.
Similarly, AI (just speaking about current AI), and the reasonably-predictable future AGI / super-intelligences (remember: more than one!) will present humanity with Enormous risk, and we'll (humanity) have no choice but spend the unbounded cost to mitigate that risk.
are there us equivalents to them?
The Intel ME chip is running its own OS on every single Intel chipset, even when the computer or laptop is shut down, and accessible directly through attached Intel WiFi or network cards. With full memory access, with no way to turn it off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
The totality of reassurance we have about it is intel’s promise that they won’t put a backdoor in.
And, why exaggerate?
I get the sense of concern for strategic vulnerabilities - I feel that is a valid, and a separate topic to ascribing cause / blame / hypothetical bases for solution-making.
So, the plastic bits?
And also passives like SMD resistors. They are also refining copper and iron from raw ore. /s
Until we have desk side silicon fabrication/placement, with accompanying tunnelling microscope features, we simply cannot trust our silicon in any way other than through utterly peaceful means, which is to say, through systems of human trustworthiness.
Technology never allows us humans to advance sufficiently well to do without it .. unless it is evenly distributed.
Right now we are all at the mercy of the masters of silicon. This is no joke!
Banning such a bright tech company is totally unwarranted, unless there are proofs of their intentional wrongdoings.
These cowards have not yet finished banning TikTok
Separating routing from WiFi has been the best thing I’ve ever done for my network.
Separating router from the AP was something I considered too for building a 10 Gbps network, since I haven't found any WiFi router that could also handle 10 Gbps wired without some accelerator chip requiring non upstream mess to work.
I would buy only Hue but that's because I have more money than sense, and they don't actually make smart plugs last time I looked, they make plugs but label them all as lights in the app, which is more annoying than it sounds.
The real problem to solve ditching TP-Link _routers_ is that all routers are uniformly fucking awful, and all you are doing is choosing your particular poison. This is especially true after Apple exited the game so long ago. I use Google Wifi because it mostly works most of the time, but that's not glowing praise. But the world has become trained that rebooting a router once a week and praying that it works when it comes back is a perfectly normal state of affairs and we couldn't possibly do this any better.
Ikea makes Zigbee smart plugs with power monitoring (Inspelning) that are ~10 Euro here (probably $10 in the US). Also Zigbee does not have all the security issues, since it is purely local and will talk with whatever hub/bridge you choose, e.g. Homey, Hubitat, or if you want to go free software Home Assistant or zigbee2mqtt.
It's somewhat insane to me that people use WiFi plugs for actuating things that actuate real-life electrical devices. Even more from companies that have a bad security reputation. Zigbee or Z-Wave all the way or possibly Matter over Thread, but the only Matter device that I had (an upgraded Eve Energy plug) has been a pain.
The real problem to solve ditching TP-Link _routers_ is that all routers are uniformly fucking awful, and all you are doing is choosing your particular poison. This is especially true after Apple exited the game so long ago.
I switched to Unifi gear (Cloud Gateway Max, two of their U7 access points, and a bunch of their managed switches) and they are a dream to set up. Making VLANs, associating VLANs with SSIDs, etc. is so easy. I had a TP Link managed switch and the interface was a huge pile of crap and I saved it several times after misconfiguration by virtue of it having a serial console. I only used it for two months or so because it was so frustrating.
At any rate, Matter over Thread is still much better than WiFi security-wise (even though it's IPv6 routable) and Ikea's Matter over Thread plug will probably be similar price-wise. And the good thing is that probably even more people have a thread border router (Apple TV, HomePods, some Amazon Echo, Google TV Streamer 4k, etc.).
Still, these Ikea plugs are so cheap and Zigbee is extremely nice, so it doesn't hurt to buy and stock ten now for the future :).
My OPNsense router currently has 74 days of uptime, and that's just because I ran an update 74 days ago. I've never rebooted it to solve a problem. The only wrinkle is OPNsense (and pfSense) is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than your average consumer router.
OTOH, my ubiquity access point reboots itself every time I change any setting at all.
The mikrotik I've been using has been pretty solid, and super super customizable.
Instead, there should be in-depth, enforced audit, compliance, and evaluation standards for gear for particular purposes. If it doesn't meet particular standard(s), then it can't be purchased or used.
tp-link routers are consistently the wirecutter consumer pick. They've always done me fine, although it's time to upgrade my 6-year-old one. (which prob demonstrates i'm not a router power user).
I think the Chinese do not want American backdoors in their products.
disclaimer: not connected in any way with Cisco, just disappointed business customer.
They could have searched on the internet for the backdoor password. /s
I run OPNsense with a collection of Unifi radios (local controller) with great success.
This feels like the painkiller autism thing. Some crazies theory became law
Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China than any specific technical threats
YOU are the security expert Brian, so stop writing like CNN Tech.
No. Regards, Cisco
What does this really matter when everyone is running agentic AIs on all of their devices?
Installing "apps" that have access to everything on a device?
Those same "apps" record everything around the device and upload that to the "cloud"?
For the average user, security doesn't even matter any more. I used to say people are running around in plain text mode, but it looks like that has been degraded to broadcast mode.
For example, They will call some device Deco / Archer ABC with a Qualcomm chip that's latest and greatest. They might sell it for 499$ for example and then let reviewers do their thing to review these products everywhere with 5 stars. Great!
Six months or maybe a year down the road when the product starts getting traction as people start buying new WiFi standards like 6/6E/7 etc. they will swap out the chips inside and launch a v2 of that same product with either mediatek chips or a slower Qualcomm SOC. This affects performance and stability and it also drives down the pricing with cheaper hardware.
This has been done a lot with Deco units. Reviews are for original v1 hardware but what's being sold is a different hardware completely. Not only is this a firmware problem but keep in mind such practices really show lack of trust.
Great example of how to lose trust in a brand.
I mean, in the case of actors like Huawei, you can at least credibly make the argument that the continued access of their support staff to internal provider networks is a significant risk, but that vector is entirely absent here.
Sure, embedded firmware has been, is, and will continue to be a tire fire prone to embarrassing compromises, but containing those is mostly about notification and containment by government agencies (which the current US administration is doing their utmost best to kneecap) and/or large ISPs (which in the US have traditionally never cared).
Forcing "foreign" products off the market in favor of "domestic" replacements with the exact same, if not worse, flaws won't fix a thing, unless you put some pretty significant controls into place that nobody is willing to enforce or even outline.
Seem more heavy lobbying to get their US marketshare here rathar than looking for secure products.
Also the report from checkpoint over firmware used to attache EU, the malware is firmware agnostic. As it can be used for other hardware.
Librecmc/Openwrt is great for security and privacy.
With Librecmc, it doesn't contain non-free blobs and uses a Linux libre kernel.
Is that even possible? Or do you always have to be on good terms with the Chinese government to own engineering, design, and manufacturing capabilities in China?
A router, a managed switch or something having an OS is another story.
TP-Link cheap consumer configurable switches used to have, IIRC, a VLAN permanently available on all physical ports, giving access to everything going through a switch. After many complaints, they "upgraded" the firmware to support disabling the VLAN from the GUI, though it remained default enabled, and included a note with something like "we only had it that way because customers demanded it".
If not, I'm not sure what you mean, as a cheapass dumbswitch always allows access to everything going through a switch. It's been my experience that any dumbswitch that can handle jumbo frames will fail to act on VLAN-tagged frames and just pass them through unmolested. (Ones that cannot handle jumbo frames might drop "large" VLAN-tagged frames on the floor.)
The term "configurable" is more useful, because it means that the switch can be configured (vs. non-configurable switches that may also be "smart", i.e., a "dumb" switch is really just a hub).
IIRC, the TP-Link models with this "feature" hard-coded into the GUI would enable a VLAN on all physical ports with VLAN enabled.
Oh, and it was fixed with a firmware update, so it's not like there was some hardware limitation.
That's a slightly strange feature. I guess it was to cope with downstream switches (or administrators(!)) that refused to assign an administrator-assigned VLAN tag to untagged traffic?
> I don't like the terms "dumb" or "smart" when discussing switches, because it isn't very useful.
In the lore that I'm familiar with, there are three general categories, "dumb", "smart", and "managed". The boundaries between the latter two categories are fuzzy... with "smart" switches tending to offer you very little configurability, and "managed" switches offering you nearly everything you'd expect from an Enterprise switch.
It's true that the difference between "dumb" and "not dumb" switches are that the former offers no end-user configuration, but how do you succinctly distinguish between a switch that offers -say- only the ability to force link speeds on specific ports, and a switch that offers link bonding and IGMP snooping and VLANs, and etc., etc., etc.? Use the terms "Prosumer" and "Enterprise"? [0]
But yeah, naming is hard... case in point:
> vs. non-configurable switches that may also be "smart", i.e., a "dumb" switch is really just a hub
Perhaps this was a brain fart on your part, because that's completely incorrect. An Ethernet hub does absolutely no filtering... all traffic that enters on one port is flooded to all other ports on the device. This means that Ethernet collision detection is essential for operation when attached to a hub, and total throughput decreases sharply when one has many chatty stations on one's LAN. The feature that distinguishes a switch from a hub is that a switch doesn't flood unicast traffic because it learns which ports have which MAC addresses behind them and routes traffic based on that information.
[0] Though, if I were king of the world, every consumer-grade switch would have the features of a low-to-mid-range managed switch. While I understand why things are the way they are, it's a crying shame that dumbswitches are the norm.
Bearing in mind that switches generally have special-purpose hardware that's responsible for handling switching, I find it unlikely that cheapass dumbswitches have enough CPU to copy LAN data and send it out to a remote system at any useful speed.
Also, next time you're looking for a switch (or if you're still within the return period for your used switch), consider Mikrotik switches. I've had four CRS326-24G-2S+ units for three, maybe five years now and I'm quite happy with them. However, I know nothing about their routers or WiFi APs.
Probably stuff related to how they handle the MAC table and VLANs.
Does it mean that I am an enemy of the state?
They were... not great...
I have no idea if that's still the case, especially post AMZ, but worth looking into if so.
I doubt the old guard was super pleased with the acquisition and many probably left voluntarily after seeing their dreams of profitable exit abruptly become acquihired by AMZN. But I don't actually know anything about what happened then. (I'm presently at eero, joined long after the acquisition... FWIW my experience isn't really consistent with your claims)
Addendum: looks like rank-and-file employees were screwed and the execs cashed in hard[1]. There was a lot of attrition after that. So I guess Amazon didn't have to lay people off, they did it themselves.
[1]https://mashable.com/article/amazon-eero-wifi-router-sale
Working there is interesting. AMZN corporate can be a drag but I imagine that's true for any FAANG or part of any large company.
TP-Link is the best for the same reason Apple is the best. They just have the momentum of being in the lead.
I would also say that TP-Link isn’t wildly and unrealistically cheaper or anything.
Their prosumer/business Omada lineup is clunky and kinda sucks compared to Ubiquiti.
Zyxel WiFi 7 APs are more competitively priced than basically anything last I checked.
They are. "Profit oriented". I bought a D-Link router once. Only one (1) port out of 4 was working. Great product, i never want to see something like this again. /s
Did you return that obviously damaged merchandise for an undamaged replacement? If not, why not?
Salt Typhoon is a serious ongoing attack on lawful intercept systems in telecom networks. There's nothing any individual can do to protect themselves from this, and it's probably deployed everywhere that US style lawful intercept specifications are implemented in telecom networks.
Of course the irony is that domestic surveillance is the attack surface for this exploit.
I would like to be able to weigh the risk of a TP link router being a national security threat against something like Salt Typhoon. But there's a lack of transparency that makes that impossible.
this is a political move, if we apply the reason of security concern to anything. it would affect 80% of things US consume since its directly and indirectly come back to china as a part of supply chain