Hanno's blog

A couple of projects exist for alternative router firmwares. I used to work with Buffalo Routers combined with DD-WRT.

Now DD-WRT became quite unusable for two reasons. First there was a Cross Site Request Forgery reported on bugtraq a while back, where one of the DD-WRT developers answered in a way that clearly showed he doesn't really understand what CSRF is - so already from a security point of view, DD-WRT seems to be a no-go.

Beside, DD-WRT development more or less is stale at the moment - there are commercial spin-offs and there's been some controversy if everything they did was compliant to the GPL. Fact is there were no new releases since several months - with open security bugs.

Now I've been looking for alternatives. What I'm looking for should be

• a ready-to-use router firmware with easy web-interface configuration from the start, not something like OpenWRT
• free software
• obviously, a project that handles security-reports in a sane way

For now, Gargoyle the only one suitable. It doesn't officially support my Hardware, but it works anyway. I haven't looked deeper into it (e. g. didn't do any security analysis myself), but it seems to do the basic tasks. If you have suggestions of other projects, please leave a comment.