Guest SSID surprises on home wireless router

My current home Internet provider is CenturyLink, and with that I’m using their recommended Zyxel C1100Z “modem”.

Via the modem’s web interface you can configure up to 4 SSIDs. I have one set up for my devices with strong security settings, and another set up for guests with weaker security settings. One thing that surprised me: when I checked the list of attached devices, devices attached to the guest SSID were allocated IP addresses in the same address range as, and could communicate with, devices attached to my trusted home SSID.

The Zyxel C1100Z will let you create LAN subnets with different IP address ranges and settings, but a device on one subnet can still communicate with devices on another LAN subnet. This would let you at least configure a host firewall (on hosts that support a host firewall) to drop traffic from a particular address range (e.g. 192.168.100.0/24).

This is lunacy, though. Why would you create separate SSIDs with different security settings if the attached devices cannot be isolated from one another? I suspect that most users do not realize this. There are some settings you can change from one SSID to another, such as bandwidth throttling, but that seems like a secondary consideration to securing your network. Needless to say, my guest network has the same security settings as my trusted home network now.

I wondered if I had overlooked a setting somewhere, so I called to confirm with CenturyLink. The technician there was able to identify the SSIDs I had configured, suggesting that they have a backdoor into the modem they provided.

The moral of the story is: never use the equipment provided by your ISP.