Hello everyone,

We're building the SPR project for you so that you can have a better router that's secure by design. We want to make the features you like work well and the features you want a reality.

We're kicking off this newsletter to keep you all in the loop with what we're working on now and ways you all can help the project move forward.

Philip and I are pushing in many areas right now. Sometimes it feels like a lot, but your support is what makes it all worth it.

In The News

We draw solemn inspiration from the bad actors out there actively exploiting vulnerable home routers to attack critical infrastructure. The US Government initiated a take down of the compromised routers. Volt Typhoon is believed to be CCCP soldiers and their targets included power, utilities, and shipping ports.

Affected vendors include:

ASUS, Cisco, D-Link, NETGEAR, and Zyxel

Here's the article:

https://www.darkreading.com/cybersecurity-operations/us-govt-reportedly-trying-to-disrupt-volt-typhoon-attack-infrastructure

Events

On Friday, February 16th Alex will be on campus at RPI in Troy, NY to talk about 802.11 fuzzing with RPISEC.

Hardware Focus

• We just received some fresh clearfog boards and will be doing a new run of cases. We still need to finish software support for VLANs and have bug fixes pending for the installer image. A critical limitation of these boards is they can only power one mediatek wireless card at a time, not two as we had hoped when we started using them last year. If you are interested in a kit from SolidRun you can see the details at the bottom here and order one for $500. The price is high that's what we're working to bring down with the next item:

• We're putting together a Raspberry Pi5 router build at a much lower cost than the above that will pretty much look like a wifi pod. The one missing piece of the puzzle is our HAT board that will run power to the pi and the wifi card as well as interface the FCC connector to pcie/m.2. We had a misstep with our initial PCB designers and our sending out RFPs at the moment. If you are a PCB designer and would like to help please get in touch.

Software Focus

• Our Next Big Thing Is Plugins. In v0.3.4 we've rolled out the ability to install a plugin from a GitHub URL. We've also added the ability for plugins to have UI and seamlessly work with API credentials to SPR. These features makes extending SPR way better and Plugins easier to use.
• Have a plugin idea?
• Want help building a plugin? We'd love to help
• We're going to convert our existing plugins to the URL install format. Not done yet!
• We keep a list of curated plugins: https://github.com/spr-networks/curated-super-plugins
• Our first external plugin with a UI could be spr-tailscale. The plugin allows networking the tailscale overlay with SPR's devices using policy/tags. It's just missing a nice frontend.

Documentation

• We've added a guide on how to use the Alerting mechanism. https://www.supernetworks.org/pages/docs/guides/alerts as well as a blog post about the alerting stack: https://www.supernetworks.org/pages/blog/spr-2024-alerts

802.11 AI Expert

• After experimenting with axolotl for fine tuning, we're planning to release a fine tuned mixtral coder that knows the 802.11 spec. We're going to release this a a model on huggingface that people can run to query about 802.11 coding and the protocol. We're currently gathering more corpus data. If you have a suggestion let us know

How You Can Help

• Help us actualize our Pi5 PCB HAT
• Write some plugins
• Keep filing issues for features & bugs!
• Ask for help you need

With Warm Regards,

The Supernetworks Team