What security features are offered by the BT Homehub 6?

Question

A friend of mine requires tight security on her home network to deal with a child protection and safeguarding issue. As a trusted friend of the family, I was asked to help.

After some risk analysis, I have identified that the family would benefit from a router with the following features:

• Wildcard blocking of domains (e.g. "*proxy*", etc.)
• Blocking of specific domains (e.g. "torproject.org")
• Firewalling of specific ports (e.g. 1194, 1743, 500, 4500, 1723, etc.)
• Mac address filtering

A bonus would be ease-of-disassembly so that the factory reset switch and WPS button can be physically-disconnected. (This was easy with Homehub 5.)

While I do not expect the first item on the list to be available on any consumer router, I was disappointed that the other three were not available with Homehub 5. Which of these features (if any) are available with Homehub 6?

Answer 1

I do not expect the first item on the list to be available on any consumer router

My apologies for not being able to answer your question directly regarding the availability of features in the pursuit of security, but I feel I must highlight one overriding aspect in this scenario.

The BT Home Hub provided by BT, MAY NOT BE in ownership by the end user. For example, you talk about wanting to disallow/disconnect physically the WPS and Factory Reset buttons. Doing so in a destructive manner and on hardware which isn't yours will incur a cost, unless, by reading license agreement/speaking with customer services, you're able to verify who's in ownership of the router.

Ultimately, if the BT Home Hub doesn't satisfy your "security features" list, the next best solution is to place the Home Hub into "bridge" mode and pass the connection onto a true or other, consumer-owned router (possibly one running something well documented, like pfSense etc.) which would meet both your software AND hardware requirements. Lastly, in any case, how can you be certain that physically modifying hardware won't detriment functionality? Placing some tape or supergluing a button is one thing, but cutting cables and into circuitboards is another.