Whole-home VPN router with hardware kill switch (OpenWrt and WireGuard)
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With internet censorship and surveillance on the rise, ie; UK Online Safety Bill (July 2025) and Australia's social media legislation (Dec 2025) introducing mandatory age verification (read: initial step on the pathway to social credit), I wanted a privacy-first solution that protects browsing history from ISPs and third-party verification services, but not one that requires you to be an Einstein to deploy.This stack turns a Raspberry Pi (or any OpenWrt-compatible device) into a network-wide VPN gateway.Key features: - Firewall kill switch: VPN down = no internet (not a software rule that can leak) - AmneziaWG obfuscation for DPI-resistant connections - Optional AdGuard Home for DNS filtering - Works for all devices including smart TVs and IoT that can't run VPN appsNot a techie? The README is optimized for AI-assisted deployment. Feed it to your LLM of choice (Claude, GPT, etc.) and it can walk you through the entire setup for your specific hardware.Mullvad-focused but works with any WireGuard provider. MIT license.Docker deploy in testing (coming soon)
HN · launched Nov 27, 2025 · 19 upvotes (top 32%) · 1 view
Niche: virtual private network services · 84 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -69% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Hardware & robotics
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 84 launches in virtual private network services →
Could you build this?
No This requires physical hardware router modification, electronics design for a physical kill switch, and custom embedded Linux/OpenWrt kernel network driver and firewall configuration.
What it would actually take: Building this requires custom router hardware or modifying an existing SoC (like MediaTek or Atheros) to wire a physical GPIO/hardware kill switch. The software stack involves compiling custom OpenWrt images, configuring kernel routing tables, WireGuard tunnels, and fail-safe iptables/nftables rules to prevent DNS/IP leaks upon connection drops. Deep networking, embedded Linux, and hardware tinkering skills are necessary.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Router VPN settings from ISP, Wireguard
Concerns raised: AI-generated content without proper review, Incorrect terminology (hardware kill switch vs fail-safe), Unclear differentiation from existing VPN solutions, Lack of human intent/editorial oversight in output, Limited commit history on repository
Feature requests: Network namespace for kill switch redundancy, Lower-level isolation mechanism instead of firewall rules
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 261 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #85 of 262 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 29 days after the earliest competitor.
- SmokeVPN · hn · 2026-08-01 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Netrinos · hn · 2025-12-19 · 93 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- pia-vpn-security-suite · github · 2026-11-02 · 33 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Fengard · github · 2026-10-09 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- proxy-farm · github · 2026-10-01 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- SMTP Tunnel · hn · 2026-01-07 · 140 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- pia-vpn-privacy-suite · github · 2026-11-06 · 479 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- RouteBoss: Network Control · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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