 Routers, there's something we all have, but it's something that we rarely think about, despite it being an absolutely essential device for internet connectivity in any home, small office, and even in enterprise environments where you might have multiple access points overlapping throughout a cubicle space and then they all are ultimately wired back to one or more routers that provide them with internet access. But despite this critical piece of infrastructure being so critical, people rarely think about the software and the firmware that are running on their routers. People rarely update the firmware on their routers and they rarely verify that they have a secure configuration when they plug them in, which is why they make such an excellent foothold for hackers to penetrate your network. Why bother compromising a receptionist's PC and have to get through firewall rules to pivot to a more important device when you can just compromise the router directly, you can own the firewall and become a remote black hat network administrator for a vulnerable enterprise. But I know that my long-term subscribers, they don't have that particular issue. Their routers are up to date with the latest firmware and using secure configurations, but have you ever considered that the firmware that's running on your router might be absolutely proprietary? If you're running closed source software on your router or any other device for that matter, it's practically impossible to know for sure what is being done with the data that goes through it. For all you know, every single IP packet from every device on your network is being sent to the CIA, Massad, and the Antichrist for deep packet inspection before being sent out to its destination on the internet. That's a big problem if you value your privacy, but luckily there's a solution. OpenWert, the fully FOSS GPL V2 licensed firmware for your router, which can not only extend the life of your home router that's no longer getting firmware updates from the manufacturer, but it can actually bring new features to it like VPN functionality on the router that's usually only found on higher end office routers. Oh, and a couple of disclaimers before we begin, installing custom firmware is typically gonna avoid the warranty on most routers and the OpenWert firmware does not come with a warranty itself. So only proceed with doing this at your own risk. And also, if your router happens to be using Broadcom wireless drivers, then there's a chance that the five gigahertz band isn't going to work. You know, the wireless five gigahertz might not work or wireless might just not work at all because Broadcom hasn't released any FOSS drivers and they generally don't support open source software at all, Broadcom. Fuck you. However, you can still use other network functions on your router. You're just not gonna be able to use the wireless feature if you're using Broadcom wireless drivers and OpenWert on your router or alternatively, you can install DDWert, which is mostly open source, except for things like its support for the Broadcom firmware blobs. Now, to get started, once you've gone to the OpenWert website and read through the information on here, which by the way, really recommend doing that if you're actually going to flash this firmware to your router. Don't just follow the instruction in this video. Make sure that you actually read the wiki, a wiki for your specific device. But anyway, once you've done that, we're going to need to download the appropriate firmware version for your router. So I really recommend this thing here. This is the OpenWert firmware selector, which I'm going to leave a link to in the description of this video. But basically, you can just type in the make and model of your router. So I put in ASUS RTAC51U, which is what I'll be using for this demonstration. And it brings me to the latest version that it's able to install, which is 22.03.6 of OpenWert. And then it gives you the option to download the kernel, which this is what you're going to want if you're first installing OpenWert for the first time, just like it says here, useful for installation or recovery. Alternatively, if you're running OpenWert already, then, and like you want to upgrade it to a newer version, just like you would if you were, you know, if you were using the stock firmware on your router, but instead of downloading it from the manufacturer, you would download this sys upgrade here. Now another option for getting your firmware is to go to the OpenWert table of hardware and just search for it in here. So obviously this is a very, very long list of devices that are supported. And again, you want to read through this to make sure that the device actually supports wireless, if that's something that you need to use. And this is also a good resource too. If you haven't bought a router already or maybe you're looking to buy a new one, you know, sometimes people want to have multiple routers in their home to get like whole home coverage. This is gonna be a good place for you to check for that as well, to see if the router that you want to buy actually supports OpenWert. Now, once you've downloaded this kernel image to install OpenWert to your router, I recommend if you aren't already to create a wired connection from the computer you're going to use to flash OpenWert, you know, the one you downloaded the kernel onto to your router, okay? You can technically do the flashing over a wireless connection, but it's not a good idea to do that because it increases the likelihood that some data is gonna get lost, you know, with it going over the air instead of through a wire. And that in turn increases the chances that you would brick your router. So go ahead and connect to it with Ethernet. And then you want to also figure out what your gateway address is. So usually it's gonna be like 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1, but you can just go into your if config or your IP settings to figure out what that is. In my case, it's 192.168.50.1 because I'm actually connected to multiple routers right now because I'm such a cool guy who's got multiple Ethernet ports on his desktop. So anyway, we're going to log into my router. All right, and then we're going to have to navigate to where we would put in our firmware upgrade. So the same area where you would do like a regular, you know, proprietary firmware upgrade, but we're just going to replace it with that kernel that we downloaded. So let's see, I'm pretty sure it's this here, yep. All right, and then select my open worked. Okay, and then we're going to go ahead and upload it. All right, so as you guys got to see firsthand, it is very, very important to actually follow the instructions on the wiki for your router model. So I couldn't just flash open work the easy way and it looks like for my ASUS AC51U. If you're on Windows, you can do this ASUS firmware restoration tool crap, but I'm a FOSS Chad, so I'm just going to TFTP from my Linux box into the router. So let's make sure we read these instructions carefully. So download the open work firmware image. Okay, we got that. So we're going to unplug the power cord from the router and press the reset button with a pin and keep on holding it down. Okay, so we need two hands for this and then plug the power cord back in and wait 10 seconds and release the reset button. Okay, so looks like I've got a flashing, slowly flashing power LED. So I'm probably in some kind of recovery mode or whatever. And we got to set the network settings for the router. So let's see for, let's see, what was it? Yeah, it's ETH-0 for me because I said I'm a cool guy with two necks. All right, so IPv4 manual, and we'll put in 192.168.1.75 for our address 255.255.255.0 and see 192.168.1.1 for our gateway. Okay, so now we have to TFTP into the router. So we're going to do TFTP and see, I'm just going to follow the instructions here. So set the binary setting first, timeout 121. So we're going to set the timeout 121. So we're going to set the timeout 121. And then connect. So we'll put in our gateway. So 192.168.1.1 and then we're going to put and because I'm in the downloads folder or the same folder that I downloaded firmware to, I should be able to just type in the name of it. Okay, and hit enter. It says the power LED flashes quickly while it's flashing. Doing something and really seem like it flashed on the power LED. Oh, okay, now it is, here we go. And the final step, of course, flashing is successful when the power LED is constantly lit. Flashing on my power LED is finished. Let's see, flashing is successful and power LED is constantly lit. So let's see if I can't log in to the router now. So go to 192.168.1.1 and actually, okay, there's might be a bit of confusion here. Let me, let me make sure I'm connecting to the right one. Okay, so I think I was connected to the right one the whole time. I just wanted to make sure because I've got multiple Nix and multiple open work routers. So I should be able to just log right in. Yeah, by default, there's no password set. So yeah, this is definitely the right one. And here you go. We have successfully installed open work on my Asus RT-AC51U. And I'm not going to get into all the details right now about what you can do with open work. Cause as you can see, there's a whole lot of stuff that you can do within it. So probably end up making a couple more follow up videos about that or you could do the research on your own because there's definitely lots of good information out there. It's maybe not just packed into a super cool mental outlaw video router password. This is one thing I definitely recommend changing because of course, as you just saw, it has no password set by default. 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