14 DAY TRIAL // The Electronic Frontier Foundation is releasing the experimental hacker alpha version of wireless router software that was specifically designed to support secure Open Wireless networks.
The Open Wireless Router is to be unveiled today at the HOPE X (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York, where EFF hopes to get some of these hackers interested in helping out with the development.
The software, as the foundation puts it, aims to do several things that routers nowadays aren’t capable of doing well or at all.
The tool will allow small business and home users to easily enable an open network. This will allow guests and passersby to connect to the Internet if they need it, without having to share the password with them. Furthermore, the password-protected WPA2 network is kept safe and separate for friends and coworkers to use.
The plan is for the software to allow users to share a limited portion of their bandwidth on the open network. This will stop users of the open network from slowing down your Internet connection or losing a large portion of your monthly quota, if applicable.
Another goal the EFF hopes to accomplish with this software is providing state-of-the-art network queuing, so most users can expect an improved Internet experience, especially when it comes to apps affected by latency issues.
The software aims to offer a minimalist, secure and elegant Web interface to set up and configure the router.
“Advance the state of the art in consumer Wi-Fi router security and begin turning back the growing tide of attacks against them. Most or all existing router software is full of XSS and CSRF vulnerabilities, and we want to change that,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes about the project.
Lastly, the software will come packed with a secure auto-update mechanism. “In addition to using HTTPS firmware signatures and metadata are fetched via TOR to make targeted update attacks very difficult,” EFF mentions.
The hacker alpha is being released to engage technical users who want to help the EFF test, develop, improve, and make Open Wireless Router even safer.
This all sounds great, but you need to keep in mind that some ISPs have sections in their contracts that may prohibit users from running an open wireless network. The terms are written loosely to cover anything from such wireless networks to sharing their Internet connection within their own homes.
The EFF encourages people to give their ISPs feedback and to tell them about the issues they have with their Terms of Service. Perhaps by the time the Open Wireless Router project is complete, things will change.