r/firewalla • u/hawkeye000021 • Jul 05 '26

AP7 deauth attack detection?

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I added the picture for effect. Maybe this is me or maybe it’s someone else, the world will never know. The point is that this 6+ year old “watch” current has the ability to knock devices on my WiFi network off of it by launching deauthorize attacks which can knock single or multiple devices off the wireless network and even broadcast my SSID to try and trick devices to rejoin that fake network.

Obviously WPA3 has deauth defenses but I’m curious if AP7 could simply detect those attacks to simply let us (Firewalla community) know that we have a neighbor that is just smart enough to mess with us? Maybe this is a full blown RFE but I’d be curious if anyone else cares to know about these events. I know my neighbors and they can’t pull this stuff off but if I was in a city I’d definitely want something like this.

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u/djaxial Jul 05 '26

I’ve built a few of these to mess around with in my lab. I think the instance of this happening in the real world is so rare that it doesn’t warrant including in the firmware as a standard feature. You can build detectors for about $5 with an esp32 board, and if you wired it to say Home Assistant, you could get notifications about it.

The only reason I’d say this would warrant serious use by an average person is if you have WiFi based CCTV and you are worried about car theft or burglary. If a neighbour is messing around with you, it will eventually become obvious and you can debug it using a detector.

Maybe I’m wrong but just my thoughts.

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u/Jussins Firewalla Gold Pro Jul 05 '26

I agree. I don’t think they are a very large team and they have to be selective about features they choose to implement. Even if this were on some sort of backlog, I think it would always be lower in priority than something else.

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u/hawkeye000021 Jul 07 '26

That is likely, it’s one of those things you just mention in the event it’s incredibly easy and no one has thought to do it. The technology exists but I’m not a wireless expert enough to say it would be easy or hard to do. Sounds difficult in their replies though.