Citing national security fears, America is effectively banning any new consumer-grade network routers made abroad.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has updated its Covered List to include all foreign-made consumer routers, prohibiting the approval of any new models.

For clarification, the FCC says this change does not prevent the import, sale, or use of any existing models that the agency previously authorized.

That Covered List details equipment and services covered by Section 2 of The Secure Networks Act, which, by their inclusion, are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to US national security.

According to the FCC, this move follows a determination by a “White House-convened Executive Branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise,” in line with President Trump’s National Security Strategy that the US must not be dependent on any other country for core components necessary to the nation’s defense or economy.

Its determination was that foreign-produced routers introduce a supply chain vulnerability which could disrupt critical infrastructure and national defense, and pose a severe cybersecurity risk that could harm Americans.

  • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 hours ago

    Doing routing/firewall in software is a lot more flexible, and easier to patch when vulnerabilities come out. Especially when software is integral to the routing (looking at you wireguard/openvpn).

    Keep in mind those edgerouters look like they have dual core embedded MIPS CPUs.

    My dell power edge is a full blown rack-mount server that could run a small plex instance. You could stick a 1060 in this thing and get Witcher 3 to play at a reasonable framerate.

    That’s what makes up for the lack of dedicated asics.

    As for the four NICs they are as follows:

    • 1gb - wan (to modem)
    • 1gb - config (to config vlan on switch)
    • 10gbps - main lan trunk to LAN switch
    • 10gbps - trunk line to public server VM host (DMZ’d from rest of lan, each VM has its own vlan/subnet/firewall ruleset)

    They don’t act as a switch because it handles packets, not frames, allowing/dropping/denying them based on rules set in software.