Hey everyone,
I’m debating between these two. A Firewalla gold and a protectli fw6e with opnsense or pfsense.
I travel to sketchy places often and do cyber security work. I want to bring these with me to have protection between me and hotels/ wherever I’m at working. Which would be better for good security with also the ease of traveling/ setup (software wise)
I suggest OpenWrt, for me I have GL-INET MT1300 (Beryl) which is a travel size 802.11ac router with OpenWrt 23.05.x firmware which provides great feature and security, if you want more processing power and/or higher line speed you can even go with GL-INET MT3000 (Beryl AX) which has 2.5G WAN port + 802.11ax WiFi!
Honestly I wouldn’t use either. Stick with a device running OpenWRT. You can pickup a battery powered travel router which will work much better and have a much smaller size and better battery life due to the CPU arch.
Does physical fw/router bring extra security compared to locked down software firewall and vpn?
IDs/ ips, more robust logging etc, if I didn’t do cyber work in areas I don’t trust I wouldn’t care but data security is important.
Are you going to constantly look at IPS logs hitting your hotel firewall? I’m not sure you’re thinking about your security quite the right way here. Secure your laptop with the firewall in there, block all ingress ports and VPN out. If you’re that much more worried about the foreign country, do like most are doing and bring a burner laptop.