Hardening the Archlinux WiFi Network Stack

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Tags:guide security archlinux
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A wise Archlinux user once said:

One shall secure his network stack, or shall suffer network leaks.
- a wise internet enjoyer

Due to ArchLinux’s design of customizability and Laissez-Faire-like package and system architecture policies, one has to make the incomprehnsibly (indeed) difficult choice of choosing his network stack. Generally speaking, a decent choice for estabilishing WiFi connection, is using iwd. And dhcpcd for ethernet. In this article, I would be focusing on WiFi and DNS hardening. More specifically, these are the areas where slight changes to the configuration would offer a more secure network stack:

A ‘downside’ of such configuration scheme is that public routers, which have login pages, need you to have DNS-over-TLS disabled for rerouting. However, it is not that hard to do so.

Note: this guide assumes you already have WiFi configured using iwd

Configuring IWD for Automatic MAC-Address Randomization

In /etc/iwd/main.conf have the following configured:

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[General]
EnableNetworkConfiguration=true
NameResolvingService=systemd
AutoConnect=true
AddressRandomization=network
AddressRandomizationRange=nic
AlwaysRandomizeAddress=true

If you would like to have complete address randomization, set AddressRandomizationRange to full. nic means that only last 3 octets are randomized. This could help with avoiding immediate detection of MAC address randomization on the network, as the first three octets are normally used as manufacturer identification.

Configuring systemd-resolve

Enable the service:

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sudo systemctl enable systemd-resolved
sudo systemctl start systemd-resolved

Configure usage of local systemd DNS server for application that use glibc’s getaddrinfo()🔗 .

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ln -sf ../run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

In the file /etc/systemd/resolved.conf have:

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[Resolve]
DNS=9.9.9.9#dns.quad9.net 149.112.112.112#dns.quad9.net 2620:fe::fe#dns.quad9.net 2620:fe::9#dns.quad9.net
FallbackDNS=9.9.9.9#dns.quad9.net 149.112.112.112#dns.quad9.net 2620:fe::fe#dns.quad9.net 2620:fe::9#dns.quad9.net
DNSSEC=yes
DNSOverTLS=yes
Cache=yes
DNSStubListener=yes
DNSStubListenerExtra=udp:127.0.0.1:53

This tells systemd-resolved to use quad9 as remote DNS server, feel free to replace DNS and FallbackDNS values with whatever server suites you.

Accessing Public WiFi

Most public WiFi requires you accepting an agreement (yuck) or signing in. If you’ve followed the previous instructions, this means that you won’t be able to resolve the redirect which WiFi routers use in order to redirect you from any website you access to their own website. However, you can temporarily disable secure DNS and use a browser that does not verify DNS signatures. Through testing, found out that Brave (chromium based) allows such redirects while Firefox does not.

To disable systemd resolving temporarily, change in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf:

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[Resolve]
DNSSEC=no
DNSOverTLS=no

Don’t forget to turn them back on once logged in to the network.

Enjoy!