What information is transmitted to a network owner about the router?

Routers
1

Hello all,

when I connect a glinet router to a WiFi, what information does the WiFi owner have about the connected device? What can I do to scramble/randomize/hide this information as good as possible?

MAC address: can be randomized

Device name?

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2

Indeed, they can know about the mac address oui (vendor name), but if randomized not.

What they still could do is looking to connection patterns, like dns requests but you can scramble that two ways, either with DoH or with vpn when dns is ensured to be over the vpn.

Other than that, they might see the calculated inaccurate distance or wifi quality.

Hostnames are possible aswell.

Edit:

If you want it to not show the host name, I know in luci you can edit wwan interface and then set do not sent host name.

2 Likes
3

Thank you,

is there a hostname randomization option (or change) in glinet interface not luci?

4

Not what I can think off, best is to just disable it in luci, or ask gl-inet to add this as feature if this does not exist in repeater function.

5

I'm not sure I'd count on it to evade the spooks as twelve chars is twelve chars but here you go:

mkdir -p /root/.bin/ # make a directory to store the shell script/sh
cat <<- 'EOF' > /root/.bin/rand-hostname
	#!/bin/sh
	# shellcheck shell=sh

	RANDOM_HOSTNAME="$(tr -dc 'a-z0-9' < /dev/urandom | head -c 12)"

	uci set system.@system[0].hostname="${RANDOM_HOSTNAME}"
	uci commit system
	/etc/init.d/system restart
	logger -t hostname "Host name changed to ${RANDOM_HOSTNAME} [✔]"
	/etc/init.d/network restart

	exit 0

EOF
chmod +x /root/.bin/rand-hostname # make the sh executable

:warning: Always execute this before connecting to WAN/WWLAN or via Repeater otherwise the device's real host name will be transmitted to the upstream network provider before you change it:

/root/.bin/rand-hostname # run it

logread -e hostname # check the device logs the hostname was changed
uci show system.@system[0].hostname # show the current hostname in effect

Pro Tip

Update your .profile path to include /root/.bin so you can run it right after logging in via SSH by rand-hostname. See related below.

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