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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

You can’t bypass AT&T’s absolutely craptastic fiber modem, even if you got the bidi transceiver you needed. The connection is encrypted with keys hardcoded into the modem.

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For their craptastic router you could downgrade the firmware, use an old exploit to root, extract the keys, and then use those keys on your own Linux box to authenticate as the router…

For the fiber ONT (what I realize now you may be calling their fiber modem) I would love to see a similar attempt to get their hardware out of the loop.

Yeah, I’m referring to the ONT - which is now additionally bundled into their router + wifi box. There’s similar exploit to bypass the router part of the equation but you still need the ONT to negotiate the connection.

Do you have a link to this exploit?

Is it actually encrypted? or is it just 802.1x like it used to be (I moved away from the service area when they were still doing separate ONT and crappy 'internet gateway' that turned ethernet into ethernet.

The latter. The session negotiation is encrypted. You can technically shelve the unit after that’s been negotiated but it would need to be plugged back in each time your connection reset for some reason.

You can also keep the unit online, but only pass it the 802.1x frames. You'll be out pennies of electricity, of course.

Yeah, I saw some setups doing that. It seems like too much hackery involving a very core piece of network hardware, which is something I’d prefer to avoid. Fortunately it wasn’t my connection so I could live easier with deciding to keep the ONT.

I dunno, if the new ONTs are as braindead as the old Residential Gateways, it's probably worthwhile, but sure, it's a little hacky. I also wonder if you can get a higher data rate using the transceiver directly; GPON is 2.5G down/1.25G up IIRC, where the ONT I used was limited to 1G ethernet (although maybe you could do bonding, but obviously AT&T wouldn't set that up)

I get a symmetrical 1G on the GPON while I thought I had the best plan... maybe I need to pay even more?

And this thing doesn't have a JTAG?

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