Iran claims US backdoors knocked out networking equipment

theregister.com

9 pointsdefrost2 comments

Whether or not the US has that backdoor, we really need open source software for networking equipment. Yes, there are open source firewalls, like OPNSense, but so far we are lacking good and generally available open source software for network switches. And at least from what I have heard OPNSense is more a firewall than a router. Not sure how well it is handling BGP and other stuff ISP need.

Since Mikrotik has been mentioned, I really wonder why they do not open source their SwitchOS. They are essentially giving it away "for free" with each of their switches anyway.

I am aware that network equipment, especially with hardware offloading (fast pass) is a little bit more complicated than just putting a linux kernel onto it, but I really wish for some development into that direction.

You can make a fully open source router using free range routing (FRR) on Linux together with a switch chip mounted to a pcie card. There are also a lot of recent development around exactly this, with Vector Packet Processing, DPDK and SR-IOV to allow wire rate processing even at 100g+.

However, that Mikrotik is being mentioned as under US control stands out like a sore thumb. Given that its a Latvian company, working entirely inside the EU, having no US offices. What is much more plasable is that an attack is deploying zero-days in the routers and switches to crash or otherwise take over the equipment. That the US would be able to hide magic satellite receivers, for decades without researchers finding anything, inside of a non-US manufacturer's equipment that can get a clean signal inside of a datacenter to remotely shut them off, is so far fetched I don't even know what to say.

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