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

[Henry Baker]

At 11:19 AM 7/11/2020, Tom Mitchell wrote:
>On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 8:00 AM Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
>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?
>
>The Pi-zero-w is fun and crazy inexpensive.
>
>The Pi-4 now with 4 or 8GB of RAM and a USB C power connector is sufficiently interesting for more.
>An Intel NUC has still more gumption.

Another option:

Used Android cellphones running LineageOS (Android 9 or better 10) as routers/wifi AP's/servers.  (Someone once hacked a version of OpenWRT for a cellphone, but sadly it didn't get picked up for the mainstream.)

Also crazy inexpensive ($30-$50, you can now buy such used smartphones in bulk: hundreds at a time if you really want!), but they have cool stuff: wifi 2.5&5 GHz, Bluetooth, GPS, builtin status display screen :-), lots of memory (some w/builtin uSD card slot for 256GBytes or more), builtin backup battery :-), builtin security system (video & audio) :-), builtin theft (motion) detector :-), built-in backup LTE WAN (w/SIM card) :-), etc.

If you run the Termux app, you can get BASH and most Linux apps, including SSH, VNC, so you log in from your laptop and do interesting stuff.

Since LineageOS is rooted, you can get at the networking stuff.

Problem: the Android permission system is a lot different from standard Linux, so it takes a long time to learn (translation: "get around it").

I'd set up an MPI cluster of such cellphones, but I haven't been able to find a massive array of cup-holders to hold them with. :-)