Last Updated on August 14, 2016 by Dave Farquhar
Tom Gatermann told me he succeeded in disabling WPS by upgrading his Linksys router–I didn’t ask what model and probably shouldn’t post that anyway–with DD-WRT.
Explicitly disabling WPS in DD-WRT is unnecessary because DD-WRT doesn’t implement WPS at all–which is a good thing. There’s no setting to look for, it’s just automatic.
Linksys routers are known to have a setting to disable WPS, but I’ve read several accounts stating the setting doesn’t actually do anything–WPS stays enabled. So loading aftermarket firmware is the best fix available.
DD-WRT also gives you some other good features, like creating VLANs. Want your web server on a different VLAN? You can do that. Want your wireless clients on a different VLAN, to protect the rest of your network in case a warwalker or wardriver manages to get in? You can do that.
VLANs are an option as long as your router has a Broadcom chipset in it, which all Linksys routers do.
What’s a VLAN? Splitting a switch into multiple networks for improved security and (sometimes) performance. Enterprise switches do that; DD-WRT lets you bring that capability to your home network too.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.