There are no Raspberry Pi vendors (we can find) willing to sell in volume to little companies like ours in the United States. That is, we aren’t buying hundreds or thousands at a time and even if we were we would be in line behind the PiShop, AdaFruit, DigiKey, Arrow, and Cannakit vendors of the world (or North America, anyway). What we have noticed is that individuals can buy limited quantities of Raspberry Pi units and ship them in fairly reasonable time frames. So, we’ve been working on how we can keep getting everyday folks simple solutions to increase their privacy, anonymity, and security even if we can’t sell packaged hardware solutions.
IPFire seems like an ideal candidate for providing a pre-configured solution that provides all of the benefits of the AMENDMENT1. We are still experimenting but the big benefits are that it is an Enterprise-Grade firewall that incorporates Tor, VPN, a Proxy Server implementation, as well as “true” (ie, Snort-based) Intrusion Detection and active state monitoring. That means your “Secure Internet Privacy Router” can also integrate a privacy VPN, act as a proxy filter to keep your kids out of places they should not be on the Internet, and actively protect your network all while providing Tor anonymizing services. That’s quite a package!
It is up and running in our lab now. The real trick to making it “deployable” to end users is making it dead simple to deploy via an image you can download and flash to your existing Raspberry Pi hardware. Since Raspberry Pi units all have 1 (or less) Ethernet ports, configuring in a way that is functional for any home environment requires some experimentation.
Photo by Alessio Lin
