Firewalla

I am using Firewalla on my home network. I love all the feature and the control it provides over network devices.
Does anyone know if there are any reasons regarding privacy that i shouldnt use firewalla?

Haven’t personally used it or heard of it. Seems like a similar offering to that of turris.com or gl-inet.com products. My personal preference is towards OPNsense as it can be deployed on any x86 device with two network ports or virtualized.

Couple of things I noticed when looking at their page though:

  • I dislike how they characterize DoH. Seems like a lot of misleading marketing fluff. Any country that cares about what you’re visiting is doing a lot more than snooping on DNS queries these days, we discuss that on this page DNS Overview - Privacy Guides.
  • I also think they could do with a much smaller range of products. This reduces costs for all customers
  • They should not be encouraging people to add surface area to their router, that includes things like docker, samba or random “Linux Apps” as they put it. Border network devices should never be micro servers.

I would say this device is very much aimed at a consumer segment. The individuals behind it do seem to be experienced.

They do seem to encourage some good practices too such as Network Segmentation Example with VLAN. Crappy untrusted IoT devices should be isolated from the rest of the network.

Regarding VPN usage however, there needs to be more focus on the fact a VPN is not a “cure all” and if you are using this on a router, it should be configured in a way that allows for selective routing.

Using a VPN on any service which is already directly connected to you, such as through physical address, credit card etc is a bad decision and only further correlates your usage to a particular VPN server.

We discuss this in our common misconceptions section 2 and 4.

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