rolph's reply to this seems a bit... off the rails. This part makes me think it's all a big conspiracy theory: > such a router will have two instances of flas

rolph's reply to this seems a bit... off the rails. This part makes me think it's all a big conspiracy theory: > such a router will have two instances of flashed firmware and you can toggle between the instances by flicking the power switch [3times] rapidly so you produce 3 boot failures. this is true in the case of linksys routers and many others but not all, so read often, implement successfully the first time. I recently purchased a high-end Linksys router and flashed OpenWRT on it so I know exactly what he's talking about. Like modern smartphones, they have two firmware partitions, A and B. When you are booted into the A partition and download an update, it is applied to the B partition. On the next boot the device uses the B partition and then eventually applies the same update to the A partition. This means that updates can be applied without having to restart the device and wait a long time for the flash, and it also means that the device can revert to the A partition if there was an error updating the B partition. That's why it was added a few years ago to Android. This is explicitly advertised as in the marketing for newer high-end routers (and other things, like computer motherboards). In OpenWRT you actually have to manually flash both partitions - update the router, reboot into the other partition, and then update again to apply it to the first partition. Which seems to be what rolph is talking about when he mentions flashing updates twice to be a deterrent to this exploit. What doesn't make sense is that rolph implied that the fix of flashing twice applied to all devices. - On devices with dual firmwares, the stock firmware flashes updates twice to complete the update process - On devices with one firmware but a secret evil firmware, the evil firmware will not be affected by updates, so flashing a new firmware twice will not fix the exploit (which is the opposite of what rolph said) I would assume high-end older routers do contain a backup stock firmware that can be loaded after multiple failed boots, just like Windows will boot to recovery mode if it fails to boot a few times. rolph hasn't provided any solid evidence to back his conspiracy theory. That doesn't mean it isn't... as you can see in the comments here, there's tons of stuff we don't know about. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17311005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17311005 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5981399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5981399 So it might actually be an evil CIA/NSA plot. Or it might not.