Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants to make its Wi-Fi networks more secure and asks for developers’ help with its Open Wireless Router project.

This project was launched at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in NYC and aims to help people easily share their routers with others, but in such a way that snoops were unable to access their information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation outlines ambitions to fight the growing number of hacker attacks against Wi-Fi routers that belong to homes and small businesses.

At the moment, the Open Wireless Router software is an “experimental hacker alpha release” which only works on router, the Netgear WNDR3800 hub. Everyone is invited to download the software to test, develop and improve it. Let’s see how it is different from its peers.

The features include a secure software auto-update mechanism which uses Tor anonymizing network – the EFF hopes that it can make attacks pretending to be software updates considerably less likely to succeed. In addition, it will also have a minimalist and secure web user interface to set up and configure the router, making it simpler for everyone to alter security settings on the device.

And the main feature of the Open Wireless Router is that it will allow small businesses and home users to allow guests and passersby to connect to the Internet if they need access, at the same time maintaining a secure, password-protected portion of their network.

Anti-virus company Sophos is backing the move, claiming that a lot of home and small business routers still suffer from basic web application security floors that allow remote control or information exposure. In today’s dangerous world, the router manufacturers need to take security seriously.

Individuals could also secure their Wi-Fi networks better. According to the recent research from Sophos, where the company’s chief was cycling across UK cities to test router security, in some areas more than a 1/3 had bad security practices.

5% to 9% used the outdated Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which was originally intended to protect people’s data moving around routers, but features known vulnerabilities, and the experts don’t recommend using it anywhere. Aside from the security fixes, Sophos also wants to see a fundamentally better way of handling open wireless networks.