This capabilities are crucial to have decent coverage, signal strength and throughput where I live (i.e.: crowded/congested wireless networks in an apartment complex).

Did OpenWRT team managed to work around them, or did the manufacturers started to play nicer with open drivers with loadable firmware?

So in English it would be like "dcadmin". Maybe they outsourced it to someone doing "gute Deutsche Wertarbeit", or it's a leftover from some agency having had their fun, or smoke&mirrors from whomever for whichever reasons.

Currently my primary shitty box router does everything wrt external connectivity and a bought AP/router sits inside offering WiFi. I'd like to remove that AP completely with a WiFi adaptor controlled by my shitty box, but I've not got around to that as it would mean learning to configure a mesh (and so at least one more of my own shitty boxes!) to get good coverage everywhere (I only have a small place, but there are still a couple of blind-ish spots depending on where I put the primary AP). Not trusting a bought router/AP to not have back doors like this raises the question: if they are going to add backdoors for direct outside connections, what is to stop the firmware instead/also trying to tunnel out and letting unwanted connections in that way? (other than this having less “plausible deniability” once discovered)

No. None of the local ISPs offer speeds above 1 Gbps.

However, I use FriendlyElec NanoPi R5C as the main entrypoint router. It has two 2.5G ethernet ports. It costs less than 100 euros. And it runs OpenWRT.

It is not a multiport, multi-gigabit device though. And I have not tested it above 1 Gbps so I am unsure about its real world performance.

I have a small Tenda 5-port gigabit dumb switch. It uses the same switch chip as this TP-Link, just with different branding; even the "SG105" model number is the same:

https://goughlui.com/2022/02/27/unbox-teardown-tp-link-tl-sg...

I have an ethernet over power adapter somewhere in a cupboard from perhaps 10 years ago.

Back then it was standard for the admin password to be 'admin'. They'd often even print it on the device itself.

Or the amateur hour backdoors are there to be found.

What's old is new again.

https://www.schneier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/paper-ke...

Yes but aren't you supposed to change that one? The problem with the rzadmin is that it will continue to work even after you change the regular admin one...

(Good to know it remains useful by using openWRT and doesn't become landfill)

Gets hard when you bring "smart" TV's to the table. They're going to need to expose into this system somewhat 'credential-free' but if you do it off MAC address then a determined user could disconnect, find MAC, clone ...

My Macbook is permanently locked out of Cox's hotspot system (used in some U.S. hotels) because the password was given to me on a tiny label which I couldn't read as a blind person except through OCR, and the OCR was wrong a few too many times.

https://nbailey.ca/post/router

So after a quick test, it was decided to deploy the debug version of just the frontend as a bandaid. Next day we saw we managed to deploy the debug version of the backend with admin stuff like this as well..

- What did you think was going on?

Jack Black: Oh, I thought it was an STO.

- STO?

Jack Black: Standard Training Op.

Plausible deniability is important.

A lot of the stuff I worked on already had glaring issues like that without me having to add it..

I wouldn't buy new hardware. Any modest machine built in the last decade would do. If possible, get a machine with an internal ATX power supply rather than an external brick, they tend to be more reliable.

If all you need is 1Gpbs and WiFi, OpenWrt on consumer hardware is probably enough though.

I remember when a backdoor was discovered in the most popular brand of keylogging devices[0], likely added there in case someone forgot their password and reached out to support.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/jw6k5v/backd...

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

This is my guess. People don't like it when a device they have turns into a brick of e-waste because they can't remember their password. So most consumer devices have either a "reset to defaults" feature or a hidden support password. Even enterprise routers and switches often have this.

I know this from personal experience.

This being said makes the situation for an attacker awfully convenient...

I think sufficiently explained by incompetence over malice applies here. Some nefarious three letter agency having a backdoor like this is pretty pointless anyway.

Unless you’ve enabled remote management you can’t even get to this backdoor from a physical network perspective.

And then you change some router settings which really aren’t a magical access point into your devices in your home. My PC isn’t just going to magically allow you to browse the file system just because a malicious actor got on my local network. They can’t intercept anything moving over TLS.

Not saying it’s good to have that kind of access, but I think at the scale of “typical home network of consumer devices” the utility and blast radius is pretty limited. Go ahead and launch a DDOS attack on my printer and use up my ink cartridges, I guess.

I think we could stop reflexively defaulting to “incompetence” when the end result just as easily resembles a deliberate exploit. Plausible deniability is an extremely effective cover when it’s smartly applied.

I’m not disputing any of your specific technical points; my cynicism is thematic. Even when I try to muzzle it, it tends to get through. The parent comment, though short, is dense with implications about cheap gear, opaque firmware, exposure surfaces I think deserve more sustained attention.

* A quick, generic, maybe sub-ideal list to harden my point.

I think it's true to some extent that a lot of the backdoors really are just stupidity, like debugging tools put into prod for convenience. Rather than suggesting that it is genuine malice, maybe the right thing to say is that for security, it doesn't matter whether or not it is malice for most purposes. If it did, it would give more incentive to do as much as possible to disguise malicious backdoors as mistakes.

Looking at the IT security landscape we see every layer, every product category if not every product itself riddled with issues at one point or another. At the same time the incentives to put those security issues in are huge, and we know attackers work systematic, creative and persistent to introduce those weak points.

Security is hard and many bugs certainly happen due to mistakes, but I wouldn't assume that all of those security mishaps stem from an endless series of blunders from "stupid" programmers.

So I would go with “Never attribute to ignorance that which is adequately explained by malice.”

The saying doesn’t mean that all vulnerabilities are blunders. It means we shouldn’t automatically assume vulnerabilities are nefarious.

If closer inspection proves beyond reasonable doubt that it was placed there deliberately and maliciously then that’s different.

But the point is most vulnerabilities are blunders so it’s better to assume that until proven otherwise.

It's really a matter of context. Security people tend to only be involved when things are already nefarious where as boring old normal people like us see get to see the mundane everyday mistakes so not just the nefarious bits.

It's possible the backdoor is deliberate, I have no idea in this particular case, but the more likely situation, absent more information, is that someone who is earning a middling wage just added the "feature" and didn't think about the security implications because no one cares about computer security.

I work heavily with security-conscious clients where vulnerabilities would be catastrophic. And we are talking high profile clients that are juicy target for attacks.

My experience is still that the vast majority of vulnerabilities are accidental rather than due to malice.

And when I say “vast”, I mean the so heavily slanted in favour of “unintended” that it’s not even comparable.

> It's really a matter of context. Security people tend to only be involved when things are already nefarious

I’m guessing you’ve not worked with many “security people”?

You’d be surprised how much of their day-to-day is mundane.