To whom it may concern,

Can anyone give me the safest setup for a linksys wireless router that runs tomato firmware. Here is what I know

Disable thw wireless ssid broadcast
Set WEP 128 bits 26 hex digits for wep encryption

That for now is all I know. Can someone give me very detailed instructions on how to create the safest setup for a linksys wireless router that will run tomato firmware.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Disabling SSID broadcast provides no security benefit.
Use WPA or WPA2. WEP is insecure.

Yes WPA2 over WEP.

Make sure the administrator password is nice and long.

Disable remote administration and wireless administration (so you have to be plugged into one of the LAN ports to access the admin pages)

I'm not sure why, but I think Telnet is enabled by default, disable that.

Disable any other features you don't need like UPnP.

I'd say make ALL your passwords nice and long, specifically your WPA/WPA2 passphrases. Awhile back, there were concerns that WPA and WPA2 passphrases could be cracked because people were using simple words. The longer, the better, in fact. use something that will be easy for you to remember but hard to crack and hard for others to get right (especially when its is 20+ characters): "We do more before 6am than people do all day". Add punctuation, capitalize proper nouns, add spacing...do all the things you can to make the password difficult to crack, as this helps to safeguard your passphrase. Mine is 31 characters long with capitalization, punctuation and spaces.

Also, before telling the OP to dismiss WEP and adopt WPA/2, I'd ask him if he even had WPA capacity. If he only has WEP-enabled devices, he'll only be able to use WEP. WEP is better than no encryption whatsoever, even if it is supposedly easy to crack. If his only choice is WEP, that's what he has (he didn't state such but there are people out there not using WPA devices).

Great point, but if he's that concerned about security he also might be willing to drop the ~ $40 on a new NIC.

Also, I think that when you setup a new WPA2 network in Tomato it gives you a really long random passphrase for the network (64 chars = 512 bit) . If you're not regularly communicating that information to new devices, then there's no harm in using it.