How El Cheapo’s firmware is locked
On Oct 10, Freddy says he has plans to port DD-WRT to La Fonera and provides a link to his site where he provides the script which checks the Fonera firmware’s encryption key: http://fon.freddy.eu.org/fonera/fon-0.7.0-rev4/bin/fonverify
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One of fon’s firmware developers joins the discussion and provides us with further technical facts about the encryption:
http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?p=14226#14226. I mirror the text here in case it gets deleted:
Pablo [Sun Oct 22, 2006 07:16]:
Those .FON file bundles are packages signed by Fon (using a private RSA key and an RMD160 message digest), and verified during the upgrade process at the router.
.FON files are not “coded” or “crypted”. They are just signed. Thus, after the first four bytes, the signature length, and the signature itself, there is a tar.gz package containing the files to upgrade the router.
Everyone can see the contents of the file, since it is not crypted. The signature is used to ensure the upgrade file came from Fon, regardless of the way it got into your router. It is the same idea as for the .deb files used to upgrade your Debian/Ubuntu system. You can always check they come from the right source, and see their contents.
The foncheckrsa executable does the same verification that can be issued with OpenSSL:
openssl dgst -rmd160 -verify public_fon_rsa_key -signature
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On Oct 25th, As Nerokak is unable to compile code that runs on La Fonera, he Launches this thread asking for help:
La Fonera: ipkg installation issue http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?t=2328
Here is the advice he recieved:
dicks [Thu Oct 26, 2006 05:02]: http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?p=14337#14337
La Fonera uses an Atheros Mips CPU running in big endian mode. OpenWrt is built for Broadcom MIPS CPUs running in little endian mode. So you will need to build your applications yourself, using a big-endian tool set.
Nerokak [Thu Oct 26, 2006 12:24]: http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?p=14347#14347
Can i build package in big endian mode from FONbasic 0.6.6 source?
Freddy [Thu Oct 26, 2006 14:51]: http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?p=14354#14354
you can, you just need a big endian toolchain (use mips instead of mipsel in TARGET)
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On Oct 31, President of fon, Martin Varsavsky, announces the official release of the open source firmware for La Fonera in his English-language blog: http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/fon/fon-publishes-source-code-.html
The code was located at this address at that time: http://download.fon.com/firmware/fonera/latest/fonera.tar.bz2
He asks that people who have examined the code and wish to submit improvements email them to:
mailto:iurgi@fon.com or mailto:iurgi@fon.es
He’s apparently recruiting OpenWRT developers for unspecified projects, to be paid for by grants from fon.
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Stay tuned for more developments!
