Firewalla Security Questions
Good afternoon:
It is now been a week since I installed and configured my firewalla purple router. I used secure shell to log into it. I noticed it was not running the latest and greatest Ubuntu release. I mentioned this because each new Ubuntu release addresses identified security issues from the past release. I am very impressed with the insight and metrics that this product has shown me. I have searched to see if any of the firewalla products have been professionally security tested by a penetration tester or white hat hacker. I have not found anything that tells me this testing has occurred. Has this been done by any of you in the community or the firewalla team? Are there any network engineers in this community that uses this product themselves? If so I'd be curious to hear your opinions on security and if you've encountered any vulnerabilities that warrant not using this product in a production environment.
Much gratitude for any responses!
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First, we never chase the latest and greatest; what's important to us are stability and security. Our team always monitors the patches and makes sure those that apply to our system get patched.
We do have a lot of security researchers/testers helping us on the side, and usually, they will come to us directly via help@firewalla.com if they have questions or issues to bring up.
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Thank you for your response. Since I am a new user to Firewalla products, I am trying to ascertain how they stack up against commercial products such as Netgear, ASUS and Ubiquity. I want to have the most secure router possible when I make recommendations to my customers. I know that statement is general in context, so a simple ranking based on overall security is what I am trying to come to regarding Soho routers. I know All routers offer different functionality some more some less. Some complicated some easy to use. I am just trying to ascertain where Firewalla stacks up.
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Just because they're not chasing the very latest release doesn't mean they're insecure. Based on what I can see, they're using Ubuntu LTS releases, which specifically have long support cycles. Their oldest version looks based on LTS 18.04, which is supported until April 2023. That's just around the corner, but the latest releases claim to be based on LTS 20.04, which is supported until April 2025. The very latest beta release appears to be built on LTS 22.04, supported until April 2027.
Even with the 20.04 release, which is already two years old, there are still three years of upstream support including security fixes on the base system.
Overall, the security of the router will depend heavily on what you expose for it. If you don't use any of the extra features, you're going to have a very small attack surface compared to also running extra services like the VPN server, or docker containers with exposure to the outside. If you're that concerned about security, you might want to look at buying a router that only routes and then additional equipment that provides all the other features you want that you can audit individually.
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