Parental Controls Broken again??

[disenter]

Hi, running latest Merlin firmware on my RTAC66U, but yeah seems the parental controls are not working (again). It isn't blocking my kids at all. Time is fine, mac addresses are correct. Schedule is correct. But doesn't stop him.

What could be causing it?

 

[CaptainSTX]

Is it the router or perhaps is your kid computer literate?

It is very easy for someone that has administrative rights for a device to change its MAC address and/or its IP and therefore evade parental controls.

If your problem is a smart kid then your best, but not perfect option maybe to double NAT another router behind your primary router and only allow your kid to connect to the secondary network.

You have a better chance of setting up enforceable rules on a router/AP if it applies to all connected devices instead of some.

If necessary you can plug the secondary router into a lamp timer and automatically shut it off when you don't want your kid to be connected.

 

[disenter]

No, it isn't that. I set all the ips by mac address, and monitor all connections, he hasn't changed anything, and it's not the first time the parental controls have been broken with these routers, either on stock or merlins firmware (since its based on the stock). The boy knows how to change an ip address, but i'd see it. I doubt he knows how to change a mac addy, and its a usb wifi, not ethernet connection..

Not that it isn't a good suggestion you're making, just that in this case its a reoccuring fault with the firmware.

 

[CaptainSTX]

You are probably correct that the parental controls are broken.

However if a user is smart enough to change the IP of their device changing the MAC address is no more difficult. Utilities such as Technitium's MAC address changer are readily available on the Internet. All someone needs to do with one of these utilities is change their MAC of their adapter to match a MAC on the white list and all parental control and other access controls based on MAC filtering have been bypassed.

Yes duplicate MAC addresses or IPs can and will cause problems, but a sneaky intruder can be in and gone before a network admin reacts and tracks down the problem.

 

[disenter]

You're assuming that he is clever enough to know the other devices on the network's mac address, and their ip addresses. The fact is, it's all logged and I do monitor it, so whilst I'm aware of how to change all that myself, I'm fairly certain he doesn't, and even if he did, he can't hide it from me. He would either put an ip in conflict since I set them all by dhcp via mac address, and if he didn't, it would be because that device is off, which i'd then know it shouldn't have been connected..

Doesn't matter, as I said, the parental controls, over the many version of Asus-wrt have periodically had broken parental controls, and been fixed several times in later releases.

I would really love to know why they keep breaking though.

For now, I will just disable the 2.4ghz radio at the appropriate times. Only my partners and my iphones and her ipad can use the 5ghz radio, he has nothing capable of it. Can't clone anything without a connection *shrugs*.

But yeah, it is really starting to put me off this Asus router, because it keeps breaking between firmware versions, for no apparent reason.