How Brisbane devs plan to beat NSA snooping

Four Brisbane security researchers plan to empower web users against government surveillance by building a router based on open source components.

The Open Router Project (ORP-1) router would be built on open source hardware and software to allow users to check that the unit was free of vulnerabilities and backdoors.

Developers Justin Clacherty, Jason Richards, Ryan Hodge and Andrew Kinmont of Brisbane outfit Redfish opened the project to crowdfunding yesterday and have gained US$7,375 at the time of publication to their $200,000 goal.

The money would cover costs up to the first manufacturing run.

Many users underestimated the impact mass surveillance and data retention would have, Clacherty said.

"US government surveillance might seem far away from Australia, but the fact is that many Australian individuals and businesses host their data with American companies that are subject to American law and American surveillance," Clacherty said.

"These days, anyone who communicates online and doesn't want the US government snooping on their data need to protect it, it's that simple."

"IPSec testing has shown full-duplex IPSec performance at 700Mbps, and we are expecting this to be line speed with 15 - 20 percent CPU usage by manufacture."

If the project received additional funding, developers would aim to include:

TOR Advanced (allow routing of certain services through your IP, limit internal IPs that use TOR, etc);
OpenVPN;
Intrusion Detection / Prevention;
Certificate Management for IPSec (plus on-board CA for certificate creation);
QoS/traffic shaping;
User management;
L2TP;
SSL VPN;
SSH key management;
Diagnostics;
Remote syslog;
VLAN;
MAC filtering;
USB storage;
USB WiFi;
SNMP;
RADIUS;
Packet capture and display for diagnostics,
Implement secure boot features.