The TP-Link TL-WR841N isn’t a particularly impressive piece of hardware, but since it works decently well and sells for under $20 USD, it’s one of the most popular consumer routers on Amazon. Now, thanks to [TrendyTofu] of the Zero Day Initiative, we now have a concise step-by-step guide on how to hack your way into the newer versions of the hardware and take full control over this bargain WiFi device. This work was initially done to help test out reported vulnerabilities in the router’s firmware, but we’re sure the readers of Hackaday can come up with all sorts of potential uses for this information.

The story starts, as so many before it have, with a serial port. Finding the UART pads on the PCB and wiring up a level shifter was no problem, but [TrendyTofu] found it was only working one-way. Some troubleshooting and an oscilloscope later, the culprit was found to be a 1kΩ pull down resistor connected to the RX line that was keeping the voltage from peaking high enough to be recognized.

Once two-way communication was established, proper poking around inside the router’s Linux operating system could begin. It wasn’t a huge surprise to find the kernel was ancient (version 2.6.36, from 2010) and that the system utilities had been stripped to the absolute bare minimum to save space. Replacing the firmware entirely would of course be ideal, but unfortunately OpenWRT has dropped support for the newer hardware revisions of the TL-WR841N.

To teach this barebones build of Linux some new tricks, [TrendyTofu] used the mount command to find a partition on the system that actually had write-access, and used that to stash a pre-compiled build of BusyBox for MIPS. With a more complete set of tools, the real fun could begin: using GDB to debug TP-Link’s binaries and look for chinks in the armor. But feel free to insert your own brand of mayhem here.

You might think that in the era of the Raspberry Pi, abusing cheap routers to turn them into general purpose Linux boxes would be somewhat out of style. Frankly, you’d be right. But while the days of strapping Linksys WRT54Gs to remote controlled cars might be long be gone, there are still some routers out there interesting enough to make it worth dusting off this time-honored hardware hacker tradition.