[Cryptography] "Home router warning: They're riddled with known flaws and run ancient, unpatched Linux"

[Henry Baker]

At 09:31 PM 7/10/2020, Christian Huitema wrote:
>Is there a build for the rasp Pi -- or any other hardware -- that is specially tuned for this scenario?

Sort of.

There is a build of OpenWRT for the RPi4 ('nightly' -- i.e., it works fine, but isn't quite as stable as for the other RPi models).  But you definitely want the substantially better performance of the RPi4 over the older models.

The standard 'Raspbian' SW also works, but you need to configure it to be a router and DNS.  This requires a number of changes, and there are lots of tutorials available for how to make almost any Linux box into a router.

There are 64-bit builds of Linux for the RPi4 which take even better advantage of its performance; these also require similar configuration to become a router.

The RPi4 also includes wifi capability with decent but not outstanding performance; it doesn't have enough power or antenna for a whole house, but you don't want that much wifi range else it extends too far outside the house.

The RPi4 has a number of USB ports which can be converted into Ethernet ports with suitable adapters; make sure your RPi4 USB power supply provides enough power (this is not quite as easy as one would like -- you should probably *measure* the USB power requirements for each device), and/or else use a powered USB hub.

YMMV.