At risk of sounding stupid, I need some pointers on how to set up a Wi-Fi router and make it as private and secure as possible.
To sound even more stupid, I don’t really know what PiHole is, or why some people route their traffic through a VPN. I suppose my main questions are these:
- What Wi-Fi router should I get?
- How do I configurate it as somebody who is somewhat privacy-conscious but not very tech-savvy?
I don’t really know how regular Wi-Fi routers work, what the common worries are, how/if data is at risk of being leaked, and so on. So, any pointers would be appreciated! Feel free to direct me to any privacy guides, as well. Cheers!
Since you are coming at this from a privacy standpoint, I’d suggest a router that runs some type of open source firmware such as OpenWRT. GL.iNet makes some good routers with their own fork of OpenWRT which has a very easy to use and intuitive UI as opposed to flashing OpenWRT to a supported router (setup then is very complicated).
Many routers out there will spy on you, make it difficult or impossible to set up privacy features, and have limited software updates for security patches.
The GL.iNet Flint 2 is a modern, fast router and makes it easy to setup a VPN, supports AdGuard home, and setting custom DNS providers. I’ve had it since launch and its had numerous updates too.
A VPN and private DNS hide your internet traffic from your ISP who will undoubtedly sell your data. However, a VPN is a transfer of trust so you want to use one that is open source, audited, and has a good track record of not logging any data. IVPN, Mullvad, and Proton are good VPNs. Quad9 and NextDNS are great private DNS providers. AdGuard and PiHole will block ads through various means.
Watch videos from Naomi Brockwell to learn more about all this stuff.
The brand/type of wifi router is more of a technical requirements discussion than privacy discussion.
For instance, I live in a two story townhome rental with the modem in the basement - so I picked up an Orbi mesh system to bounce wifi up to the second floor. I also have a fairly complex network with IoT VLAN, DMZ (for remote VPN) and other network segments - again the orbi doing different VLANs per SSID was a deciding factor.
I’ve also only used the Orbi as an access point, relying on a dedicated firewall/router for that stuff.
If you’re looking at a flat network (e.g. everything on one segment - the typical home user setup), pretty much any WiFi router from Best Buy or equivalent will do the job. Check your current devices to see if you can take advantage of WiFi 7 technology - otherwise save a few bucks and go WiFi 6.
For security purposes, change the default SSID (the wireless name) to something unique - and change the password to something from correcthorsebatterystaple.net. You don’t need the default jumble of letters and numbers to be secure.
Lastly, getting to your privacy concerns, look at the DHCP settings - that’s what hands out IP addresses to your devices so they can reach the internet. Change the DNS servers to something other than your ISP. This looks like a good starting point.
The big things are to make sure you don’t expose your router management to the Internet (the default shouldn’t do that) and to make sure you periodically check for firmware updates.
If you want to up your game, you could look at spinning up a self-hosted DNS server like Pi-Hole - but that can be a bit more advanced to get setup and troubleshoot if something goes wrong.
and change the password to something from correcthorsebatterystaple.net.
i wonder how secure or private it is to use a password generated online. You should use a password manger instead. They have built-in password generators
Any router from a mainstream brand is likely fine, just don’t enable any of their “cloud” BS and don’t use their smartphone app. I’ve had good luck with Asus, they have an app but you don’t have to use it at all.
For security, try to enable WPA3 on your Wi-Fi networks, otherwise WPA2 is probably fine unless you’re being targeted by a government-sponsored hacking operation. Choose a long password for your network.
Once you get it up and running, then worry about DNS and PiHole and VPNs and all that. Don’t get in over your head.
Solid advice. I already know what brand is good in my area (Bahnhof), and I’ve enjoyed using Mullvad and NextDNS, so I already know what VPN and DNS I’m comfortable with.
I’ve always been a bit confused about the exact purpose of PiHole, what it is and such, but I’ll have to read up on it and see if it fits my needs.
I’ve been running PiHole for awhile, in short it’s your own DNS server that’s configured to block DNS requests to known advertising domains. So when you load a website and it sends a DNS request to PopularAdvertisingCompany.com to load an ad, PiHole blocks the request so the ad can’t be loaded. It’s useful for devices that you can’t put an ad blocker on, like iPhones and smart TVs and such, but can’t block stuff like YouTube ads cause they come from the same domain as the videos themselves.
It also has bonus features like DNS caching which can speed up web browsing.
The other thing to keep in mind with PiHole - some things are just going to break with it’s default blocking, namely the Google suggested results.
i know, I know - just don’t use google, but android phones/parents have a hard time not just braindead going to Google for results.
It’s not the end of the world - I’ve trained myself to just keep scrolling to actual results.
Another feature for PiHole is local DNS - if you want, you can set up custom dnsmasq entries for self hosted/internal services.
Is it necessary to use PiHole if I already use NextDNS? Do I need PiHole to configurate NextDNS if I want all the ads gone on each device connected to the Wi-Fi?
Well, I can’t help you much with what router to get, but one thing I do is use ControlD.com free DNS. They have several levels of blocking you can do for free. You can do no blocking at all, you can block known malware, you can block known malware, and advertising, or you can block known malware, advertising, and big social media. Since this is on the router DNS setting, it will apply to every device as long as it is on your network. And then you can also set it up on your Android or iPhone so that when you are on mobile data, it also keeps the same level of blocking.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/hardware/?h=networking#secure-your-network
Really you need to first define your threat model, the EFF has a good guide on that.
Maximum paranoia would be Wi-Fi only connects to a restricted VLAN that can only talk to a VPN server. You must use a VPN to access your network over wireless. That’s probably too much work for most people. But it would be the most compartmentalized, not trusting Wi-Fi encryption, which really isn’t that strong
Super basic data hygiene means you only use WPA2 and above security for your Wi-Fi network.
Depending on your actual threat model, what you choose to do will probably be between those two points.
