The most critical device on a home network is the least watched.
Home networks now hold the kind of data enterprises spend fortunes protecting: banking credentials, personal records and, since the shift to remote work, direct tunnels into corporate systems. Yet they are rarely monitored and seldom patched.
Endpoint antivirus does not close the gap. It guards one device, and only after a threat has already crossed the network. Tools that could help, like PRTG or Nessus, assume networking expertise the average household simply does not have.
Move the defence off the endpoint and onto the gateway.
A Raspberry Pi 5 sits inline with the home’s traffic and unifies three defences, Nmap host discovery, a UFW firewall, and Suricata intrusion detection and prevention, behind a deliberately simple mobile app with near-real-time cloud sync and one-tap actions. It gives non-technical users the network-level visibility and control that, until now, only enterprises had.
A survey cut the scope before a line was written.
Six questions, written in plain language, put to home users. The answers set the boundaries directly.
Intrusion detection and firewalling, the two things users could name a reason for wanting.
Vulnerability assessment, dropped from scope rather than built and left unused.
Real-time updates through a phone, which is what drove the whole architecture.
The Pi runs a Flask REST API as an auto-starting service. Each feature maps an app tap to a shell script and a Python parser that writes state to a Firebase Realtime Database, which pushes live updates to a Flutter app.
A functional, end-to-end appliance that meets all four objectives with an effectively plug-in install: connect it inline, no configuration required.
Assessed against the constraint it was built for, not a benchmark it was never aimed at.
It was evaluated functionally and qualitatively against the non-technical-user constraint rather than by throughput, and the low-end Pi’s upload limits meant syncs were made user-triggered. Both are flagged as clear directions for future work rather than written around.
Inline gateway
A Raspberry Pi 5 that sees and filters all household traffic: defence at the network layer, not the endpoint.
Three unified defences
Nmap host discovery, a UFW firewall, and Suricata IDS/IPS, each surfaced as a one-tap action.
Live control plane
A Flask REST API, auto-started as a system service, bridging the Pi to a Flutter mobile app via a Firebase Realtime Database.
Research-led scope
A survey of non-technical home users cut vulnerability assessment and drove the real-time, mobile-first design.
Plug-in deployment
Zero configuration. The Pi even takes on the router role, turning a hardware constraint into a self-contained design.