Displaying items by tag: Routers

Universal Plug and Play UPnP) is one of those technology decisions that make you wonder what people were thinking. The concept is fairly clear, find a way to make things easy for someone to just connect a device to a network and have it function without interaction. Devices like the Xbox Series X|S require this for their remote play feature as the ports and IP addresses needed to function would be overly complicated for most users to set up. So, you enable UPnP on your router and just plug the Xbox in. Sound great, but as with anything that create convenience, it also brings about risk.

Before DEF CON 22 started we published an article that the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) was going to host a very interesting competition called SOHOplessly broken. This competition was to features a large array of common SOHO (small office home office) routers and put them to the security test. As you might imagine the competition revealed that security is not the primary focus of this segment of the market. In all a total of 15 zero day vulnerabilities were uncovered during the competition in four common routers.