Pervasive vulnerabilities in SOHO routers
SO HOpelessly Broken

Home and small office networks typically place their security in the hands of an inexpensive device that serves as a router, DHCP server, firewall, and wireless hotspot. How secure are these SOHO router devices? We're glad you asked …
Small office/home office (SOHO) routers are a staple networking appliance for millions of consumers. SOHO routers are often the single point of ingress and egress from a SOHO network, managing domain name resolution, firewall protection, dynamic addressing, wireless connectivity, and, of course, routing. The heavy use of SOHO routers in the consumer market, as well as the targeted demographic of non-computer-savvy users, has not surprisingly led to some very easy-to-use turnkey solutions.
The list of known vulnerabilities for SOHO routing devices is long (Figure 1), and our research revealed 56 previously undisclosed security vulnerabilities in SOHO devices. The alarming quantity of these security problems demonstrate how the rich service and feature sets (e.g., SMB, NetBIOS, HTTP(S), FTP, UPnP, and Telnet) implemented in these routers comes at a significant cost to security. All the extraneous services running within these SOHO routers expose attack surfaces that a malicious adversary can leverage to compromise the router core and gain a foothold in the victim network.
Once compromised, any router – SOHO or otherwise – may be used by an adversary to secure a man-in-the-middle position for launching more sophisticated attacks against all users in the router's domain. The attacks could include sniffing and rerouting all network traffic, poisoning DNS resolvers, performing denial of service attacks, or impersonating servers. Worse still is that these routers are also firewalls and often represent the first and last line of defense for protecting the local network. Once compromised, the adversary has unfettered access to exploit the vulnerabilities of local area hosts that would be otherwise unreachable if the router were enforcing firewall rules as intended.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Cairo Dock 3.6 Now Available for More Compositors
If you're a fan of third-party desktop docks, then the latest release of Cairo Dock with Wayland support is for you.
-
System76 Unleashes Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta
System76's first beta of Pop!_OS 24.04 is an impressive feat.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
-
Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
-
USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
-
Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.