this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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Replace the firmware on your current TPLink devices with OpenWRT, for a temporary solution.
A solution to what exactly? Nobody has provided any information about definitive risks.
An as OpenWRT goes it would either be a permanent solution or no solution at all. How would it be temporary?
Nowadays it wouldn't surprise me if a secondary system was hidden on a chip on a router, meaning you could replace the main firmware and still be spied on, it's better to have hardware you can trust top to bottom from the country you live in, but as far as what the risk cited by US officials is then it's probably something like being used as a sleeper device that will later be included in massive botnet attacks like the AISURU botnet well documented to be made up of compromised consumer devices.
My money would have been on Cisco rather than TP-Link, though.
It'd have to literally be a full CPU that somehow has only read access to the RAM such that it'd be a genuine feat of engineering. Either that or the whole thing is just a virtualized device, but the cooling demands for either method would exceed the threshold for passive cooling in those enclosures and require fans at that point.
Bloomberg wrote an article several years ago that was absolutely slaughtered for making up from bad sources such a chip concept except even more unbelievable because they claimed it was hidden inside the PCB itself and only like 6 or 8 pins? Absolutely absurd for anyone who understands electrical engineering or microcontrollers at all.
OpenWRT is a permanent solution for older TP-Link routers. Their newer routers are locked down and not supported by OpenWRT.