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by glitchc 86 days ago
It's not so simple. Routers, like most tech emitting and modulating an RF signal by design, are certified products. The radio frequency bands, output power, allowed channels are all tightly controlled. Allowing end-users control without restrictions over such equipment would be unsafe.
1 comments
em-bee 86 days ago
how is that different from any computer with a network card and wifi support? routers really are not special here.
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glitchc 85 days ago
It's quite different. The transceiver in your device is mainly a low-power receiver, transmit power is limited to ~100mW at best. Meanwhile a typical AP can go up to 1W per antenna for transmit. Also, the firmware that operates the wifi stack on your network card is not open source or user-modifiable beyond firmware updates issued by the manufacturer. I suggest reading up on wifi and RF before going further.
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rstuart4133 84 days ago
> I suggest reading up on wifi and RF before going further.

I'd suggest neither matter in the face of how the problem is solved in the consumer cards the OP was talking about. They solve it by locking down the firmware that controls the radios.

The reality is most routers do that too. You can replace the firmware in most of them with OpenWRT or something similar. You still can't exceed regulatory limits because of the signed blobs of firmware in the radios.

Nonetheless, here we are getting comments like yours, which imply all firmware in the device must be behind a proprietary wall because a relatively small blob of firmware in them must be protected. It has its own protections. It doesn't need to be protected by the OS or the application that runs on top of it.

Yet it's in those applications where most of the vulnerabilities show up. Making them consumer replaceable would help in solving the problem. Protecting the firmware is not a good reason to not do it.

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glitchc 81 days ago
I was responding to the original post about open standards. My point is that anything with an RF transceiver will never be as open as a standard PC with replaceable components. The radio portion will always be blocked off. That relatively small blob will always limit how much control you can exert over the device.

We don't have to look far. The embedded space with Arduinos, ESP32s and even RPis is a hacker's paradise. Yet the radio stack is restricted in all of them. For instance, it's not possible to take an ESP32 board and turn it's single antenna into a MIMO configuration, even if you make a custom PCB with trace antennas.

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em-bee 81 days ago
My point is that anything with an RF transceiver will never be as open as a standard PC with replaceable components. The radio portion will always be blocked off.

sure, but again, why would the RF transceiver on my desktop PC or in my laptop be any different than the one in my router?

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em-bee 80 days ago
this topic about how to turn anything into a router is tangentially related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574034
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