Anti-virus company Sophos is backing the move, with its global head of security research, James Lyne, saying that many home and small business routers still have "basic web application security floors which allow remote control or information exposure".
Between 5% and 9% used the "incredibly ancient" Wired Equivalent Privacy WEPprotocolcol, which was supposed to protect people's data moving around routers, but has known vulnerabilities and should not be used anywhere, Lyne said.
"The software aims to do several things that existing routers don't do well or don't do at all," explained the EFF in a blog post outlining ambitions to fight "the growing tide of attacks" against Wi-Fi routers belonging to homes and small businesses alike.
The expansion plans were announced at a product launch in Beijing on Wednesday, where the company updated its television set-top box and unveiled two new wireless routers.
Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent is a leading supplier of 4G and LTE mobile networks and related services, best known in the UK for its modems and routers and cheap mobile phones.
But adding a lot more routers to the internet would complicate matters hugely and do little to solve the latency problem.
And networks without encryption beam plenty of other data besides routers' technical details.
After all, Cisco was selling real goods, such as routers, not dotcom vapour and banner ads.
Because the internet is a physical entity, of fibres, routers and switches, governments can and do disable parts of it.
Ryan Ding, Huawei's head of product development, recalls that his firm stuck with its efforts to penetrate the markets for routers and LAN switches two important bits of telecoms gear despite losing money on each for more than a decade.
At Rice University in Houston, Texas, home to the first residential Super Wi-Fi network, white-space is used to carry data back from a series of conventional Wi-Fi routers scattered around the campus.
