Investigation of home router security
Emmanouil Karamanos · 2010
Home routers are common in every household that has some kind of Internet connectivity. These embedded devices are running services such as web, file and DHCP server. Even though they have the same security issues as regular computers, they do no run protection software such as anti-virus and they are not updated. Moreover, the importance of these devices is misjudged; all network traffic is passing through them and they control the DNS of the network while, in most cases, they are on-line around the clock. When more and more non-Internet features are implemented into home routers, such as Voice over IP and network storage, their role becomes more special and many security concerns are raising. In this thesis, we investigate the issues resulting from this special role; the importance for these devices to be secure, the attacking vector and how the devices can be compromised to be part of a large home router botnet. We conclude by proposing ways to make the current implementation more secure, suggesting ways to protect routers from botnets without user interaction, that is from the ISP, while respecting the privacy of the end user and we identify what future work needs to be done.