Ask Slashdot: Can Commercial Hardware Routers Be Trusted?

First time accepted submitter monkaru writes "Given reports that various vendors and encryption algorithms have been compromised. Is it still possible to trust any commercial hardware routers or is 'roll your own' the only reasonable path going forward?" What do you do nowadays, if anything, to maintain your online privacy upstream of your own computer?

Comments

Re:No.

[sabri]

actually the obvious answer is that trust is not a binary thing.

Actually, the obvious answer is that you don't have a choice. No matter how much effort you put into it, you will always be depending on third party hard- or software that simply have to trust. So, you want to solder your own PCB? Sure, go ahead, but your Ralink SoC is still manufactured somewhere in China. Don't trust Cisco's IOS? Sure, write your own, and let me know how you designed and manufactured your own ASICs. And then we're not even discussing the fact that as soon as the packet leaves your router, it will enter one that you don't even own. Yes, there is a lot that you can do and I think the closest real answer to the poster's question is to just get an OpenWRT capable router and compile from scratch, but to not trust anyone is simply not an option.