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Unsecured router connected to secured router = insecure?

There's a lot of ridiculousness that led up to my decision to try to do this but basically...my primary wireless router is my Netgear WGT624v3 which is plugged into my cable modem. Then I have a second wireless router (Linksys Wireless-B BEFW11S4) connected to my Netgear from LAN port to LAN port. The internet seems to work on both. My motivation for doing this was that for whatever reason other people in my house can't connect to any wireless networks that have security (or at least WPA) set on them, but I definitely want WPA2-AES set on my wireless for security. So my netgear is secured and the linksys is unsecured so that both interests can access the same internet connection.

My main question is, does having the unsecured wireless router connected to my secured wireless router compromise the security? If so is there a way to isolate the linksys so that it doesn't compromise security but can still access the internet?

Any info would be appreciated, thanks!

BTW, it's of no importance for any services like port forwarding or anything to successfully work on the unsecured linksys router, just web access.

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voltage22
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Security of what? Your house network? The other wifi network? Your bandwidth? It's not just one question there.

One idea would be to make sure the BEFW (piece of crap, BTW) is setup as a router, with it's own NAT translation and DHCP. This way any clients on it are not going to be 'directly' connected to the rest of the network. All regular (web, email, etc) services will work fine.

I don't know if that Netgear is smart enough to allow setting up a VLAN or other routing to isolate the BEFW network from the rest. It may not be. You'd need that to completely prevent the BEFW devices from even getting a route into the internal network.

That does make it easier, one less set of thing to configure.

If you 'needed to allow BEFW-connected devices to access your internal network then you'd be able to do it with a VPN.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

voltage22 hath wroth:

Look at it this way.... You have a house. It has a front door that is properly locked and secured with all the technology of modern man. You also have a back door that can be kicked in with little effort. How secure is your house?

The basic security problem is how to prevent someone from connecting to your inside network. That's primarily the basic wireless security. Some models of the BEFW11S4 will do WPA, while others will only do WEP. If WPA, then it's good enough. If WEP, your security is lacking.

You can pile on additional layers of security in the form of a VPN of some sorts, but the level of complexity this introduces is far more than just replacing the BEFW11S4 with something more modern.

My various BEFW11S4 v4 boxes were chronically hanging or going weird. I do not consider this model to be very reliable.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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