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2023 Year in Review

· 5 min read
Alex Radocea
Philip Olausson

What a year it's been for the Secure Programmable Router (SPR) project! We've made great strides in empowering users to take control of their networks, prioritize privacy, and unlock network configurability. Let's dive right into the highlights of 2023 and peek at what's in store for the future.

device-list

Major Accomplishments:​

  • iOS App Launch: We've extended network management to your fingertips with the release of our official iOS app on the App Store. We're thankful to our users from almost each and every region on the App Store.
  • PLUS Membership: Our community now has the option to support the project with PLUS and unlock advanced features like:
    • Mesh networking for seamless coverage with multiple APs
    • Site VPN support for selectively routing traffic through a remote Wireguard VPN
    • Advanced firewall rules with scheduling, domain name, and regular expression support
  • Shipping Dev Kits. After the global supply chain crunch, we're proud to be shipping dev kits to users
  • Microsegmentation for Containers: We've taken SPR's container support to the next level with integrated container microsegmentation, enabling granular control over container and interface traffic.
  • VLAN Trunk Support: SPR can work as a wired firewall as well. Connect devices to your SPR network securely through a managed switch, with SPR terminating a VLAN Trunk Port.
  • Expanded Network Visibility: Our new event bus, database, and configurable alerting mechanism provide key insights into network activity, empowering users to detect and troubleshoot issues effectively and analyze IOT & device traffic.

Thank you to our users!​

  • We Build For You: We're incredibly grateful for our active user base and their invaluable suggestions. Your feedback drives our development roadmap! Join the conversation on Discord or create a GitHub request to share your ideas. Many of SPR's capabilities come from requests. Some of the feature requests that have landed are wifi scanning from the UI, the lan_upstream tag for restricting and managing access to upstream local networks to enable secure router chaining, and load balancing support across multiple Uplink interfaces.

  • Privacy and Ad Blocking Excellence: SPR continues to excel as a self-hosted WireGuard + DNS Ad block solution, offering unmatched configurability with per-device rules, easy exception management, and upstream DNS over HTTPS support for enhanced privacy. Users can get these capabilities by self hosting in the cloud as well as running SPR at home as a router.

  • Network Debugging Made Easy: Users have been able to use SPR to successfully debug connectivity issues with devices like Ring cameras, pinpointing problems with Amazon's cloud services rather than home Wi-Fi although Ring may say otherwise.

  • Uncovering Unauthorized Access: Event logs have helped users identify and address unauthorized access attempts, including scenarios like accidental connections from new neighbors moving in.

  • Speedier WiFi: Even with our Raspberry Pi dev kits, users report impressive speeds between 500-700 Mbps over USB3, surpassing their previous routers. With MT7915/6 cards, SPR users today can enjoy actual WiFi 6 gigabit (1000+ Mbps) connectivity over 2 spatial streams as measured with iperf3.

Technical Research:​

  • Unscathed by MacStealer: SPR's design was further validated by the MacStealer (CVE-2022-47522) flaws. MacStealer bypassed most Client Isolation approaches due to state errors in low level firmware with MAC address handling. SPR's per-device VLAN and per-device password approach is totally immune to this category of protocol flaws.

  • Research AP in Scapy: We've developed functional WPA2 AP research scripts in Scapy for working with Wi-Fi frames, compatible with mac80211_hwsim and real wireless cards. (https://github.com/spr-networks/barely-ap).

  • Turtles WiFi Hacking While waiting for the supply chain to unlock at the start of the year, we put together some wifi security training focused on protocol. We actually let people boot a kernel for a self hosted wireless lab, in the browser. Or people can play offline in containers. This is a bit different than other labs which teach people to run prebuilt software as we guide people towards working at the packet level. Check it out here

device-list

2023's Hardware In Pictures​

pi4 Pi4 with a Mediatek MT76-based USB3 Adapter

pi4 Solidrun Clearfog Dev Kit

The Road Ahead:​

  • Empowering Plugins: Our next major focus is facilitating community-built plugins. We've already created prototypes for Tailscale support and mitmproxy, and we're working on UI integration and streamlined installation to make plugin usage as seamless as possible without sacrificing security.
  • PI5 Router with WiFi-6: Our next hardware device will be a a PI5-based router packaged with wifi-6 support.
  • Eliminating firmware risk We're also developing software to eliminate firmware attack surfaces with WiFi.

Join the Movement:

We invite you to be part of the SPR journey! Contribute to development, share your feedback, and help us shape the future of open-source networking. Together, we can build a more secure, private, and customizable internet experience for everyone.

Visit our website and GitHub repository to learn more and get involved