Good. TPLink makes cartoonishly insecure consumer grade equipment. A better solution is that the US establishes some minimum infosec standards for this equipment, but that would require time and thought.
Do you have any information to share about their bad security? I have a couple of their routers which seem to work quite well. Any I really at risk, and anymore than I would be with something from Linksys or Netgear?
Here are two new vulnerabilities from this month.
Here are some more exploits from 2023
Here are all the TPLink vulnerablies known publicly
Am I really at risk, and anymore than I would be with something from Linksys or Netgear?
As always, depends on your threat model. I have cheap TPLink switch in my home network because its cheap and kept behind a pfsense firewall. The TPLink switch is not allowed to talk to the internet. This is good enough for me as I don’t have a threat model where something attacks the switch from inside my network.
For completeness here are Cisco’s and Netgear’s vulnerabilities. Infosec security is a journey, not a destination.
Thank you for that! I’m keeping the cvedetails link bookmarked.
My two devices, the Archer BE9300 router and the TL-WA3001 AP aren’t listed with any known vulnerabilities, though I suppose it may be they haven’t been tested. The BE9300 is pretty popular though so that would be surprising.
The known vulnerabilities in their other devices don’t appear malicious or any worse than other common vendors either however. Given the state of the US government and its desire to monitor it’s citizens, I can’t decide if it’s contempt for TP-Link is a bad thing or not. They might just be mad they can’t get the vendor to give them a backdoor.
I will add the following:
US was looking at this before Trump took office (Dec 2024)
https://www.itpro.com/security/the-us-could-be-set-to-ban-tp-link-routers
TP Link’s sloppy security lead to the creation of a Chinese botnet.
https://cybernews.com/security/chinese-hackers-hijacked-thousands-of-tp-link-wifi-routers/
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.
OpenWRT is a permanent solution for older TP-Link routers. Their newer routers are locked down and not supported by OpenWRT.
If you can, look for a mikrotik device, especially if you are in Europe. They are well established, not hard to use, but have extreme depth of features for advanced users, and they are not expensive.
I have one mikrotik poe AP I use and am quite happy with, but certainly not something I’d recommend for non-technical people because it’s firmware isn’t consumer friendly.
However my question is really what’s the real risk in using TP-Link devices. Neither the article or any of the comments link to any explanation of the actual risks. Is my network actually open to hackers now? Is my router able to be used for dos attacks or for other purposes now? Everyone is acting like their flaws are common knowledge and there’s zero info about genuine flaws or exploits.
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wow, CNET has really gone to shit, hasn’t it?
three popups, including a full screen, autoplaying video, and banner
guess that’s going on my blocklist
They always sucked, they used to have a list of some software that I used and downloading through them inevitably got you multiple.other prompts for third party shit and random download buttons.
They’ve been bought out and gutted a couple times over. It’s very sad
Well, they have had a lot of vulnerabilities. Most people won’t even update the firmware let alone install OpenWRT on them.
That’s more an user issue than a product issue though.
TP-Link is excellent for cheap switching hardware which a ton of vendors overprice for the same quality. Its your OG made in China deal that works pretty well for the price.
Otherwise, you should skip it as a router and instead opt for either a better AIO, or put in the 2 minutes of extra effort to get a cheap ethernet router and a separate AP because AIOs are still overrated in 2025 for the price per quality.
Not to mention that 5 GHz channels are getting clogged these days even on the DFS channels which people shouldn’t be using all the time. I know its not possible for a lot of people, but you’re really better off on even bargain basement maximum cheapo Cat-5e cables.
Gb WiFi speeds and MuMIMO not gonna matter when you have CSMA/CA throwing a metric ton of RTS and CTS packets causing increasing amounts of retries as you add stations.
Probably worst scenario is if you’re living in an apartment surrounded by like 50 stations within range. No amount of 802.11 magic is gonna give you a stable connection.
Spot on. Also, the popularization of wifi “smart devices” that often have a buggy or just bad network stack implementation does not help
This actually reminded me of an actual instance of this I discovered for a family member.
Their 2.4Ghz devices would just randomly drop connections at seemingly random times, and changing the router didn’t fix anything.
So I fired up bettercap to take a look, and lo and behold it was a GE “smart” oven that would spam advertise its SSID with beacon frames on an interval and would block traffic because all the other devices would see a busy channel.
The funniest thing is said family member specifically decided against using the oven wifi feature because he already knew it was not going to be useful or even reliable, but he had no idea the wifi feature was left on which was causing all the packet drops.
Upon further investigation, we realized he actually did turn it off, but because the tap button was basically at elbow height, it was super easy to accidentally bump and flick back on.
Conclusion is that some GE ovens double as a crappy WiFi jammer lmao.
TP Link is the Temu of routers. For decades they have been the “cheaper router” and it shows.
Bullshit.
It depends on what you buy from them and always has been. Their Omada line is on par with Ubiquiti, some other gear is similar to other commercial grade gear.
If you buy their cheap shit, yeah,it’s cheap. But they,as most manufacturers, have a broad spectrum…
Just reflecting comments from clients. Was a computer consultant for 45yrs(now retired). They did not like them.
Yeah,does not reflect the actual situation.
Currently especially their SDN capable stuff (Omada) is far better than e.g. the Ubiquiti stuff - we are relatively surprised by the build quality for the bucks you pay,tbh. (And unlike Ubiquiti they can be run stand alone and SDN).
Not defending their China-issues btw, we absolutely recommend to all our clients that they put a OPNsense in front of it. But it does it job and has it’s place in small businesses. (And tbh,their Wifi gear is good enough that I have seen it in fairly large deployments)
Sadly there’s not too much alternative for that sector atm.
Can still put openwrt on them can’t you?
Depends on CPU, not all of them supports out of box nor have upstream
Yeah. Definitely should check the openwrt supported routers for sure
- goverment warns about Wifi network secuirty
- PRISIM exists.
Billionaires buying children exist.
A possible ban on TP-Link routers – one of the most popular router brands in the US – is gaining momentum, as more than half a dozen federal departments and agencies back the proposal, according to a Washington Post report on Thursday
Considering they recently also complained about Mikrotik I would,well, not give to much merit on that shit.
Microtik is the router brand that I want to love, I even looked into deploying them when I worked at a service provider. Those little things had more features than anything else, but unfortunately they had such a poor track record with vulnerabilities that they really can’t be considered.
Yeah, especially router wise I tend not to recommend them as well, but we widely use OPNsense as FWs now. Switching wise they are good and tbh, their track record got much better. (And everyone elses got worse, looking at you,Forti)
We tend to recommend Omada for smaller clients that would otherwise use ubiquiti (their track record is…far worse) and simply put a OPNsense in front of it. These are small healthcare establishments - the alternative is often far worse (cousin John doing the network or some antique Zyxel the local IT shithead service sold them as new) and with the OPN we can do due dilligence IT security wise.
Cursed site is auto playing a video that isnt even visible when on mobile.
This. Jesus fuck I thought I was going insane for a minute. Awful design.
Would it just ban the sale, or somehow ban my tp link devices? My tp link WiFi has been going strong for years
Get a Protectlii vault with opnSense. Not horribly expensive and very very secure.
The rest of the world would be getting discounts on TP-Link gear.
TP Link is just as bad at security as most other consumer electronics vendors:
Is there a way to jailbreak them and run them on Linux?
OpenWRT
My tplink archer has been running it for 5 years or more without issue*
*excluding human errors
Will this still allow a mesh setup?
You can basically do anything in OpenWRT, and if my memory is right a mesh setup is possible too. It may not be easy to setup, but it’s possible.
Thank you for the information.
OK, if it runs OpenWRT, what is their problem?
It depends who you’re trying to protect. Joe consumer doesn’t know what OpenWRT is.
Yes; it’s pretty trivial to flash something like OpenWRT on them as they don’t restrict what you can install whatsoever.
Do Americans not have FritzBox routers for that crap to be the most popular router?
FR even though I hate Republicans and this admin when I saw this headline I thought “good shit, regulate the industry.”
