How do you protect your home network?

[StevieP]

I've got a TP Link Archer VR2800 router at the moment feeding the internet into my home network of several mobile devices, TV's, PC, laptops, NAS, games consoles etc and I use the built in "access control" feature to create a "whitelist" so that in addition to needing the password, the MAC address for each device has to be listed before it will let you use the internet or connect to the network.

Anyway I recently had an issue in adding a new device and it turns out that my router has a maximum number of devices in that whitelist of 30! So now I'm stuck either having to delete a lesser used device first or turning the feature off all together!

Has anyone else had a similar problem or can recommend any better way of securing the network over and above just relying on the Wi-Fi password?

 

[StevieP]

Try setting up some VLANs. You could have one VLAN for non-whitelisted devices which has restrictions, and another VLAN for whitelisted devices with no restrictions. A guest wifi is an obvious choice for the former, your physical LAN an obvious choice for the latter.

Not sure I've got the technical know-how to do this - I mean I was going to look into the guest network option (assuming the whitelist acess control won't affect this??) but wasn't sure how it works!

Is there some info on this you can point me towards??

MAC address whitelisting is pointless anyway, all it does is slow down the process of adding new legitimate devices to your network. If someone can crack/whatever your wireless network password then it's trivial to find the MAC address of a currently connected client and then spoof that MAC address on their wireless network card.

I was wondering about this myself - I mean presumably I'm really only protecting myself from people in the immediate vicinity and the extra level of protection (such as it is) may be useless anyway!